LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 



ELEVEN LECTURES 

BY 

REV. HENRY R. ROSE, B.D., 

Minister of Elm Street Universalist Church, Auburn, Me. 




" Theology will find out in good time that there is no atheism at once so 
stupid and so harmful as the fancying God to be afraid of any knowledge 
with which He has enabled man to equip himself" 

— James Russell Lowell. 



/ 



UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE 

Boston and Chicago 

1894 




Mqq*3 



Copyright 1894 
By Henry R. Rose 






Printed at the Journal Office, Lewiston, Me. 



DEDICATION 



Co tf?e BeloDeb tDife 

^Whose gentleness, sympathy, and optimism 

have made my life and ministry 

full of joy and courage 

and aspiration, 

I affectionately Dedicate this Book. 



CONTENTS 



Lecture I. Reason in Religion. .... 1 

Shows how one may decide what is true and what is false 
in Religion. 

Lecture II. The Bible. . . . . . 16 

Shows what the Bible is not, what it is, and what it does . 

Lecture III. God. . . . . . 33 

Shows that there is a God; that his nature is Love; that 
his relation to mankind is Parental. 

Lecture IV. Evolution. . . . . 51 

Shows that the theory of the Evolution of the Universe, 
does not abolish God or his Providence. 

Lecture V. Man. ...... 75 

Shows that the fact of the Evolution of Man calls for new 
doctrines of his nature, history, duty, and destiny. 

Lecture VI. Jesus Christ. . . . . 101 

Shows that the humanitarian doctrine of Jesus is true. 

Lecture VII. Salvation. . . . . . 127 

Shows what man really needs to be saved from, and how 
he is to be and is being saved. 

Lecture VIII. Hell. 153 

Shows that the dogma of endless punishment is neither 
Scriptural nor Christian. 

Lecture IX. Annihilation. . . . . 178 

Shows that it is not possible for sin to destroy the sinner. 

Lecture X. Immortality. ..... 200 

Shows the reasons for predicting the future conscious 
existence of the soul. 

Lecture XI. Heaven. . . . . . 221 

Answers certain burning questions about the Future Life. 



Texts Supporting Doctrines Advanced. . . 238 
Choice Bibliography. ...... 240 



PREFACE 

This volume tries to answer the question: u If a person 
use Good Sense in considering the familiar and vital subjects of 
religion and theology, to what conclusions will he come?" 

This attempt was made from the pulpit of the author's 
church. The people of Auburn and Lewiston were invited to 
come and learn "What Universalists Believed," the implica- 
tion being that Universalists, by using Good Sense in Religion, 
had reached certain conclusions worth hearing about and 
worth tying to. As a result of this public invitation, the 
church — capable of seating 1,000 people — was filled for eleven 
alternate Sunday nights by members of every religious sect. 
Universalists, Unitarians, Congregationalists, Calvinist Bap- 
tists, Free Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Adventists, 
and Roman Catholics were in constant attendance. The night 
of the last lecture, the church was so crowded that people were 
turned away. At the close of the course, requests came from 
all sides for the lectures in book form ; and in answer to this 
demand they are published now, substantially as delivered. 
The author feels relieved of much of the responsibility which 
attaches to the bringing forth of another book, inasmuch as 
most of the burden for the issue of this one falls on the broad 
shoulders of an enthusiastic public. 

The unexpectedly large audiences, their composite charac- 
ter, and the remarks made during and since the delivery of 
these lectures have convinced the author that religious people 
are not satisfied with the old and reigning theology of Christen- 
dom, and are seeking for something to take its place. A 
larger number of the laity of the "Evangelical" sects disbe- 
lieve, and "are rejecting the pivotal dogmas of the "Evangelical 



PREFACE Vll 

system of theology" than their clergy suspect. It is because 
of this deep-seated and wide-spread dissatisfaction, and because 
of the bearing of the theory of Evolution on theology, that so 
eminent a scientist, and so observing and candid a Presbyterian 
as Prof. Joseph Le Conte has declared: "We are even now 
on the eve of the greatest change in traditional views that has 
taken place since the birth of Christianity .... Not a mere 
shifting of line, but a change of base; not a readjustment of 
detail only, but a reconstruction of Christian theology " is needed 
and is coming. In view of such a necessary and imminent 
transformation, it behooves some one or some sect to come 
forward at once with a theology harmonious enough with the 
theory of physical, mental, and moral evolution and agreeable 
enough to the demands of Good Sense to take the place of the 
theology that is passing away and hold the ground permanently. 
The theological system outlined in this volume makes a 
modest bow to the public, and announces itself as the system 
competent to supersede the old. 

The doctrines set forth herein fairly represent the advanced 
and dominant thought of the Universalist denomination. 
These lectures are the first, so far as the author knows, that 
give, in printed form, the teachings of progressive Universalists 
in a systematic manner. They enable the reader to begin at 
the beginning and go on to the end in his endeavor to learn 
just what Universalism is to-day. 

The lectures on Jesus Christ, Man, and Annihilation are 
commended for very careful reading, especially to Universalists 
and to those who think Universalim lacks scriptural and scien- 
tific and philosophical foundations for its theology. 

The method of quoting almost exclusively from eminent 
clergymen and scholars of other sects in support of positions 
held by Universalists or taken by the author, was adopted 
because of the "Evangelical" character of the audience, and 
to show how surely and how widely "Evangelical" preachers 
and leaders are giving up the Old Orthodoxy. 

The author has felt more satisfied than ever with his course 



Vlll PREFACE 

in opposing ' ' Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity " 
since reading this declaration by the Rev. J. M. Buckley, D.D., 
editor of the (Methodist) Christian Advocate: " If we were 
to adopt the Universalist principles and methods of Scripture 
interpretation, we should attack the doctrines of eternal pun- 
ishment, the fall of man, the vicarious atonement, and every 
other evangelical principle with all the vigor we could command, 
but with courtesy and kindness of spirit. We should consider 
that we were doing a service to God and humanity to induce 
Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and other evangelical Christ- 
ians to give up their dishonoring vieivs of God and human nature.'''' 
As Lyman Abbott said, in closing his lectures on the 
"Evolution of Christianity," so I desire to say in presenting 
this volume to the public : " I have tried to speak with abso- 
lute candor and with absolute frankness, and if what I have 
said has shocked your prejudices or seemed to treat with 
irreverence or disregard your sacred beliefs, I pray you to 
excuse me. It was not my thought, but it is my thought and 
my deep desire to do what in me lies to make the spiritual 
truth that underlies the faith of Christendom clear in the lan- 
guage of its close of the Nineteenth Century." 

Henry R. Rose. 

Auburn, Mb., July, 1894. 



GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 



LECTURE I 

REASON IN RELIGION 

" Prove all things: hold fast to that which is good." — St. Paul. 
"Nothing can alter the responsibility which is laid upon each 
soul . ' ' — Westcott. 

No question is interesting and perplexing inquiring 
and earnest Christians so much as this one : " What is the 
Seat of Authority in Religion ? " by which is meant, " On 
whom or on what may we rely to determine whether 
religious doctrines offered us are true or not ? " People 
are be^innino; to ask : "Is there an infallible Guide for us 
to follow in our quest for certainty in religion? or an 
inerrable Book for us to consult ? or an authoritative Fac- 
ulty whose decisions we can accept as final ? " 

In answer to these questions three replies have been 
made by the three different parties in the Christian church. 
First came the Roman Catholics, declaring that there is an 
infallible Guide in religion, namely, the Church. Next 
came the "Evangelical" 1 Protestants, denying this claim 
of the Church of Rome, and holding to the infallibility of 

1 Evangelical is "specifically applied to a section of the Protestant 
Churches who profess to base their principles on Scripture alone, and 
who give distinctive pre-eminence to such doctrines as the corruption of 
man's nature by the fall, atonement by the life, sufferings, and death of 
Christ, justification by faith in Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit in 
conversion and sanctification, and the divine exercise of free and 
unmerited grace.— (The Century Dictionary.) 



2 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

the Bible. Then came the Liberal Protestants (the Uni- 
versalists and Unitarians) , saying that there is no infallible 
authority of any kind in religion ; and maintaining that 
among all the fallible means of determining the truth, 
Reason is supreme. 

And thus it stands to-day. There is a conflict of 
opinion among Christians, not only as to whether infalli- 
bility can be had in religion but as to where the highest 
authority is to be found. 

The Roman Catholic Position. The Church of 
Rome holds that there is a seat of authority in religion 
and that it is an infallible seat, namely, the Roman Cath- 
olic Church. * The keys to the counsels of God are held 
by the Church and the Church alone, and whatever it 
announces or declares to be true ex cathedra, through its 
Head, the Pope, is immutably true, and there is no other 
court of appeal. Therefore, it refuses the Bible and the 
Reason any place as authorities. Cardinal Newman said : 

" We indeed devoutly receive the whole Bible as the word 
of God, but we receive it on the authority of the Church ; and 
the Church has denned very little as to the aspects under which 
it comes from God and the limits of His inspiration. Not the 
Bible but the Church is to him [the Catholic] the oracle of 
revelation. Though the whole Scripture were miraculously 
removed from the world as if it had never been, grievous as 
the calamity would be, the Catholic would still have enough 
motives and objects for his faith ; whereas to the Protestant 
the question of Scripture is one of life and death." l 

The " Evangelical " Protestant Position. The 
f( Evangelical " Protestant turns upon the Roman Catholic 
and denies his claims, saying that the Church has no 
authority at all in religion, and holding that the Bible 
and the Bible only is infallible, and that it, therefore, is 

i A Study of the Sects, Lyon, p. 18. 



REASON IX RELIGION 6 

the seat of authority ; the court to which all appeals must 
be taken. He excludes the Church and the Reason, 
refusing to one any voice at all, and granting to the other 
a little say, providing it is subordinated to and in harmony 
with the teachings of the Bible. The infallibility of the 
Bible is a matter of life or death to the " Evangelical " 
Protestant ; if its infallibility be disproved and its falli- 
bility and subordination proved and granted, he thinks 
Christianity and truth will go under and infidelity and error 
will clamber on top and stay there. Therefore, he pins 
his faith to John Calvin and iterates and reiterates Calvin's 
article in the Westminster Confession of Faith, as follows : 

" The whole counsel of God ... is either expressly set 
down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may 
be deduced from Scripture ; unto which nothing at any time is 
to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit or tradi- 
tions of men." 

The Liberal Protestaxt Position. The Liberal 
is kindlier toward the Roman Catholic and the "Evan- 
gelical" Protestant than they are toward each other or 
him. He frankly refuses their claim of infallibility, either 
for the Church or the Bible. He believes that the Church 
may speak some truths and with authority because they 
are truths; and he is sure that the Bible is to be relied 
upon in many of its utterances, because it, too, teaches 
truths ; but to the mind of the Liberal, the say-so of 
the Church and the teachings of Scripture are not necessa- 
rily final, nor does either constitute the Seat of Authority 
in religion. With Lyman Abbott, the Liberal says, "The 
Bible is a means of revelation rather than a final state- 
ment. We shall go back to no creed or age of the 
Church for the final word." The Liberal believes that God 
may vet reveal truths not announced by the Church nor 



4 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

stated in the Bible. He holds that Jesus was intention- 
ally cautious when he said, in his last words to his disci- 
ples : "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot 
bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of Truth 
is come, he will guide you into all truth," a caution 
equivalent to a command that they and others should 
expect further discoveries of truth ; a reminder which finds 
modern expression in the advice which Phillips Brooks 
gave to the Yale Divinity students, as follows : 

' ' Never forget to tell the young people that they are to 
expect more and more light and larger development of the 
truth which you give them. Oh the souls which have been 
made skeptical by the mere clamoring of new truth to add 
itself to that which they have been taught to think finished 
and final ! " 

The Liberal believes in perpetual inspiration and pro- 
gressive revelation, and he will not be surprised if the 
lapse of time develops something new and great concern- 
ing God, and duty, and destiny. The Liberal knows no 
infallible seat of authority in religion save God himself. 
God is the fountal source of truth, and the Church and 
the Bible are two of the many channels by which the 
verities of God are brought to men. God is the testifier, 
and the Church and the Bible are witnesses as to his 
testimony. As witnesses they must report to somebody 
or something. That to which they bring their testimony 
is the Reason. Reason, says the Liberal, is the tribunal 
and the highest tribunal ordained of God whereby man 
can decide upon evidence of all kinds. Its verdict must 
be solicited and accepted, sooner or later. Its decision 
can be relied upon above the decision of any book, creed, 
person, or institution. If it be said that Conscience is 
superior to Reason as a judge of religious truth, the Liberal 



REASON IN RELIGION 

replies that this is a distinction without a real difference, 
because Conscience is but another name for "Reason when 
exercised in the moral realm/' ! Therefore, the Liberal 
exalts Reason above the Church and the Bible ; above the 
decisions of councils and the dogmatism of creeds. He 
makes every teacher of religion submit his teachings to 
Reason for acceptance or rejection. 

The Liberal Position Justified. Now that we 
know the three positions of those who answer the ques- 
tion, "What is the Seat of Authority in Religion?" we 
are interested to decide which has the right of it. I have 
no disposition to enter here into a criticism of the Roman 
Catholic and "Evangelical" Protestant positions, except 
in a negative way. My purpose is to justify the position 
of the Liberal Protestant, and if I do this, I will have 
overthrown the claims of the two other parties. If I fail 
in establishing the Liberal position, the reader can investi- 
gate the matter further, and come to his own decision as 
to which of the others is right. 2 

The Libera], be it noted, claims two vital things : 1, 
that man has a right to use his Reason in religion ; and, 
2, that Reason, being the supreme judicial faculty of the 
mind, is the Seat of Authority in religion, as in every 
other department of inquiry and knowledge. I will prove 
these claims in their order : 

1. JIan has a right to use his Reason in religion. 
This claim is supported, in the first place, by the lan- 
guage of the Bible. In the Old Testament we find 

1,4 Conscience is that power by which moral law is recognized. It is 
Reason discovering universal truth, having the authority of sovereign 
moral law, and affording the basis for personal obligation." — (Calder- 
wood: Moral Philosophy, p. 65.) 

2 See also lectures on The Bible and Man. 



b GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Isaiah reporting God as saying to men: "Come, now, 
and let us reason together," as if the Almighty placed 
dependence on the reasoning ability of man, and was 
willing to convince and persuade rather than force man to 
obedience. In the New Testament there are a number of 
direct commands for men to use their reason in religion. 
Paul says, "Prove all things," and he could not have meant 
that the Thessalonians were to do this by referring impor- 
tant or mooted questions to the Church or to the Gospels, 
for neither the Church nor the Gospels were in existence at 
that time ! St. John says, "Beloved, believe not every 
spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God." 
St. Peter says, "Be ready always to give answer to every 
man that asketh a reason concerning the hope that is in 
you." If Jesus nowhere explicitly tells men to rely upon 
their reason in determining God's truth, he nowhere tells 
them to rely on the Church or the Bible, or even on his 
word. He says : "He that doeth the will of my Father 
will know whether this doctrine be of myself or of God", 
a statement equivalent to an admission that he would not 
have men accept his doctrines because he taught them, but 
that he was ready to submit them to the trial of experience 
to establish their truthfulness. 

The claim that man has a right to use his reason 
in religion is supported, in the second place, by the 
example of biblical characters. Look at Paul, the great- 
est apostle of Jesus. He was a reasoner rather than a 
dogmatizer in religion. He was consistent. He told 
others to prove all things, and when he went among- 
men he appealed to their reason, with reasonable argu- 
ments, to win them to his ideas. Thus, while he waited 
at Athens he reasoned with those who met with him daily. 
And in Acts (xxiv : 25) we learn that Paul reasoned 



REASON IX RELIGION 7 

with Felix and his wife about righteousness, temperance, 
and judgment to come, until Felix trembled. And in 
that great epistle to the Romans, after his magnificent 
exposition of doctrine, he commences his conclusion thus : 
" I beseech you, therefore (that is, in view of what I have 
made plain to you), by the mercies of God, that you pre- 
sent your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto 
God, which is your reasonable service." Not that they 
were to do this thing because he had said so or any one 
else had said so, but because it was obviously their reason- 
able service. Paul trusted the reason of men, and appealed 
to it constantly. 1 

In the third place, the Liberal believes that the Chris- 
tian should use his own reason in religion, because such 
procedure is in thorough accord with the genius of Prot- 
estant ism . Luther and his followers were called protestants 
because they protested against the claims of the Roman 
( liurch, especially its claim of sole and infallible authority in 
religion. Luther held that the individual can deal directly 
with God apart from the mediation of the Church, and 
tli at God's word verified itself, and must verify itself, in 
the conscience of the individual, apart from the authority 
of the ( Jhurch. ff The Church," said Luther, "cannot give 
more force or authority to a book than it has in itself. A 
council cannot make that to be Scripture which in its own 
nature is not Scripture." Thus did Luther and the early 
reformers sweep the authority of the church entirely out 

1,1 St. Paul, though disclaiming as 'carnal wisdom' and 'the wisdom 
of this world ' the philosophic prepossessions of his time, is himself the 
subtlest of reasoners, an inveterate rationalist, never more thoroughly 
in his element than when urging the claims of Christianity on psycho- 
logical grounds, or boldly rationalizing the Old Testament to rebut the 
scruples of his countrymen."— (F. H. Hedge, Reason in Religion, pp. 
210-211.) 



8 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

of their religious system. But they went further, and 
denied all external authority in religion, making the indi- 
vidual conscience the interpreter of religious truth. The 
eminent scholar, Professor Marcus Dods, D.D., says : 

"Protestantism is not merely the substitution of one exter- 
nal guide for another : it is, rather, the exchange of what is 
outward for what is inward ; of what is indirect for what is 
direct. It is the exchange of God's voice recognized by the 
Church and interpreted by the Church, for God's voice recog- 
nized by the individual and interpreted by the individual. The 
Reformation was no doubt a transference of allegiance from 
the Church to the Scriptures, but that was by no means all that 
it accomplished ; it was also a transition from dependence on 
the Church's authority to dependence on conscience. It was 
essentially the assertion of the indefeasible right and duty of 
the individual to deal with God directly and for himself." 
This is precisely the position of the Liberal, and it enforces his 
claim that his course is in accord with the genius of Protes- 
tantism. And he is ready to say, with this same eminent 
Christian, " He is only half a Protestant who merely transfers 
his allegiance from the Church to the Bible, and leans upon 
this new crutch as the Romanists lean on Rome. To accept 
the Bible on the Church's authority, and to accept every state- 
ment in it as infallible truth whether it awakes response in 
conscience or not, is to remain precisely in the Romanist's 
position ! " 

2. But the Liberal's contention does not end when it is 
conceded that men have a right to use their reason in 
religion ; he takes a further position and says that Reason 
is the highest court of appeal and the real Seat of 
Authority in religion. He proves his claim by the fol- 
lowing considerations. 

The Bible and the Church are not, properly speak- 
ing, seats of authority ; they are witnesses rather than 
judges of truth. They are channels through which divine 



REASON IN RELIGION y 

and human truth flows : basins in which the facts of God 
and the guesses and errors of men are deposited. They 
must be examined ; they must be analyzed in order that 
the truth may be separated from the error ; the genuine 
from the false. The Bible and the Church are means of 
revelation, not authorities on revelation. Like John the 
Baptist they come to bear witness of the truth, but their 
witness must be submitted to some court before its validity 
can be determined. Their testimony may be true or it 
may be false. If the Church says that the Pope is infal- 
lible and that Mary was immaculately conceived, or if the 
Bible declares that Joshua commanded the sun to stand 
still, as if the sun moved ! or that the law of God is " an 
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," their assertions 
must be considered by some tribunal. To say that these 
things are true because in the one case the Church and in 
the other the Bible says that they are true is to beg the 
question. It is not difficult, when such references are 
made, to see that the Bible and the Church are witnesses 
rather than judges ; that their office is to deliver things 
purporting to be true rather than to pronounce upon the 
truth of that which they deliver. The faculty to which 
they do and must address their message decides upon the 
merits of that message, and that faculty becomes the seat 
of authority, and its decisions are authoritative. 

Now the Liberal holds that this faculty which should 
judge all teaching and pass upon evidence of all kinds, is 
the Reason. Its function is judicial. It is not a channel 
of truth nor a reservoir ; it does not discover truth ; its 
great function is to verify or disallow testimony. 1 Not 

iThe office of reason in religion is not discovery, but verification and 
purification. Its function is to make and keep religion true and pure, 
by eliminating from the code of elementary beliefs the human additions 
and corruptions that have gathered around it." — (F. H. Hedge, Reason 
in Religion, p. 209.) 



10 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

only is Reason judicial, he is the Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court of the mind. Every other faculty defers 
to his authority ; the intellect and the feelings recognize 
that their verdicts must sooner or later be submitted to 
him for final ruling. He is no arbitrary judge ; he is the 
very incarnation of justice and, therefore, his verdicts are 
always just. Reason does not quit the bench to go in 
search of cases. He simply sits and waits, with placid 
brow, until the case is brought before him and the evidence 
is all in, and then he proceeds to render the verdict, and 
when he speaks his voice and manner show that he consid- 
siders his ruling ultimate and final. 

Therefore, in view of the fact that the Bible and the 
Church are obviously but witnesses of the truth, and in 
virtue of the fact that Reason is judicial and pre-eminent 
among the judicial faculties of the mind, the Liberal holds 
that his exaltation of Reason to the Seat of Authority in 
religion is justified. 

Eminent Corroboration. And he is pleased to 
quote the experience of men, and the testimony of able 
critics, in further support of his position. 

Is it not a fact that by every educated mind all inward 
appeals and all outward solicitations are referred to Reason 
before being allowed ? Passionate men permit the verdict 
of their emotions to impel their conduct ; thoughtless and 
timid men allow appeals to their sentiments and credulity 
to determine their beliefs and actions, but properly-bal- 
anced men submit every verdict of the feelings and every 
appeal from without, to dispassionate and impartial Reason. 
Thus do the highest minds recognize that Reason is the 
proper and chief seat of authority in conduct and belief. 

And when men read the Bible or listen to the doctrines 
of the Church, what do they consciously or unconsciously 



REASON IX RELIGION 11 

do but rely upon their Reason to determine the truth of 
what they read or hear? 

" Who is at your elbow as you read Exodus and Leviticus 
to tell you what is of permanent authority, and what was for 
the Mosaic dispensation only? Who whispers to us, as we read 
Genesis and Kings, This is exemplary ; this is not? Who sifts 
for us the speeches of Job, and enables us to treasure as divine 
truth what he utters in one verse, while we reject the next as 
Satanic raving? Who gives the preacher authority, who gives 
him accuracy of aim, to pounce on a sound text in Ecclesiastes, 
while wisdom and folly toss and roll over one another in con- 
fused and inextricable contortions ? What enables the humblest 
Christian to come safely through all the cursing Psalms and go 
straight to forgive his enemy? What tells us we may eat 
things strangled, though the whole college of Apostles deliber- 
ately and expressly prohibited such eating ? Who assures us we 
need not anoint the sick with oil, though James bids us do so? " 

Does any outside person or institution do these things 
for us, or is it done by that inner voice ; by clear-eyed 
Reason, often called Conscience, and sometimes called 
Good Sense ? Surely, in these matters men and women of 
every sect rely upon the verdict of their reason, whether 
they are conscious of the fact at the time or not ; so that 
the experience of the most cultured minds and that of the 
humblest Christian meets in supporting the Liberal in the 
lofty and authoritative position he gives to Reason. 

And what say eminent scholars and undoubted Chris- 
tians, — men who are not Universalists or Unitarians, — 
about the claim of the Liberal ? 

Dr. Fairburn, of Mansfield College, Oxford, declares that, 
" Though by reason man may reject revelation, he can never 
without reason either know it or accept it." Professor Le Conte, 
an eminent Presbyterian, says : " There is, and in the nature 
of things there can be, no test of truth but Reason. We must 
fearlessly, but honestly and reverently, try all things, even reve- 



12 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

elation, by this test," a declaration quite similar to that of the 
famous Bishop Butler, than whom Christianity never had a 
stronger defender. In his celebrated Analogy he wrote : 
4 ' Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge con- 
cerning anything, even revelation itself. .... Reason 
can, and it ought to, judge not only of the meaning, but also of 
the morality and evidence of revelation." Perhaps some of you 
recall the strong language of Henry Ward Beecher on this 
subject. He said : " God made the reason, and it is that by 
which we go back to Him. Without reason there is no duty, 
no interpretation of Providence, no knowledge of God, and no 
civilization. They who decry Reason as ' simply a natural 
faculty,' and therefore not to be trusted, rail against God him- 
self." It may surprise some to know that John Wesley, the 
founder of Methodism, declared that " every man must think for 
himself, since every man must give account of himself to God." 

And lest any one fear that this practice of letting 
every man think for himself; of urging men to use their 
reason in religion as in other things, may destroy faith 
and Christianity, let him listen to Dr. Hedge, that scholar 
of Christian gentleness and faith : 

u The cause of reason is the cause of faith. In affirming 
this, I but re-affirm what the wisest and devoutest of the 
Church have always maintained." And to Dr. Briggs, whose 
Orthodoxy is disputed but whose scholarship and honesty are 
widely conceded and admired, who says: " I rejoice at the 
age of Rationalism, with all its wonderful achievements in 
philosophy. I look upon it to prepare men to use their reasons 
in the last great age of the world. It is impossible that the 
Bible and the Church should ever exert their full power until 
the Human Reason, trained and strained to the uttermost, rises 
to the heights of its energies and reaches forth after God and 
his Christ with absolute devotion and self-renouncing love." 1 

1 " From the genius of the gospel, no less than the constitution of the 
human mind, I infer the right of reason in religion. Christianity is 



REASON IN RELIGION 13 

In these ways does the liberal Christian seek to estab- 
lish his position that Reason is the real and chief Seat of 
Authority in religion, and it seems to me that he succeeds. 
At any rate, the Universalist believes that these consider- 
ations warrant him in exalting Reason to the first rank 
among the authorities in religion, and he therefore submits 
all testimony purporting to be from God, no matter whence 
its source, to this bar, and if Reason approves, the Univer- 
salist accepts the testimony and uses it either for thought or 
conduct ; but if Reason disapproves, the Universalist rejects 
the testimony and refuses to let it influence his thought or 
determine his conduct ; if Reason neither disapproves nor 
approves, the Universalist, like a wise man, reserves judg- 
ment and waits for more light. We try to be consistent 
in our practice as we are in our theory of the office and 
authority of Reason in religion, and therefore our constant 
attitude toward every doctrine is one of inquiry, to wit : 
Is it Rational? not, Is it Scriptural? not, Is it in the 
" Evangelical " creeds ? not, Have the Councils endorsed it ? 
not, Does the Romish Church approve it ? but simply and 
always, Is it reasonable ? does my reason and the reason of 
reasonable men, endorse it? We are modest, you see, 
because we value the convictions and opinions of other 
reasonable men. We, indeed, recognize that each indi- 
vidual must decide for himself what is true and what is 
false, but we know that he is assisted in his decision by 
the reasoning of kindred minds. Truth is many-sided, 

professedly a revelation of reason. The first systematic statement of it 
by a competent witness affirms this, and justifies rationalism in one 
word. And that word is the Word, in the original tongue a synonym 
for Reason. ' In the beginning was the Word (or Reason), and God was 
the Word,' and in Christ was the Word ' made flesh.' The eternal Rea- 
son revealed in the human; not different from the human in kind, for 
it comes to 'his own,' and is the ' light that lighteth all who come into 
the world.'— (F. H. Hedge, Reason in Religion, pp. 210-211.) 



14 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and many seekers arc more likely to find it than one 
seeker. There are some truths that are self-evident, and 
every individual can see and accept them unaided. There 
are other truths that are difficult to determine, and many 
minds must work upon them and many reasons report 
their verdicts before they can be established. In religion, 
as elsewhere, there are times when we prefer to rely 
upon a "consensus of the reason/' rather than upon the 
verdict of our own individual reason. A story will illus- 
trate my meaning-. A gentleman, in crossing the ocean, 
found more than one mariner's compass in use by the 
ship's officers. Up aloft he saw a compass, fore arid aft 
were two more, on either side of the steamer he; found 
them stationed, and in the pilot house he saw another in 
use. He was surprised to find so many compasses aboard 
the steamer, and he asked the ( 'aptain what it meant. The 
Captain replied: "We need these compasses in different 
quarters in order to get our true; bearings. We find that 
the material of the vessel will deflect the needle in the pilot 
house just a little, that the atmosphere lias an influence at 
times, and that our- cargo also acts upon the needles. So 
we keep the compasses in different parts, and at certain 
intervals we consult them all, and then by comparing the 
directions they give, and striking an average, we feel that we 
have gotten pretty close to our true bearings." The pilot 
and ('aptain relied upon a consensus of the compasses in 
order to fie sure of the course of the vessel. And he 
who believes in the ability of the Reason to point unerr- 
ingly toward the truth, realizes that there are influences 
that deflect even its finger, and that the wisest, safest 
recourse 18 to consult a number of reasons, and rely upon 
the consensus of their decisions. 

Universalists also do another thing : they place much 



REASON IN RELIGION 15 

faith in the voice of the emotions. They think the heart 
utters truth as well as the head, and they demand that 
every theory establish itself by satisfying both the head 
and the heart. If the heart condemn it, then we feel that 
there is something wrong about it, even though the head 
approves. AYe believe when the whole truth is found, it 
will be agreeable to both the head and the heart, and be 
favored with the benignant smile of Reason. 

JVow when it is taught that there is a God and that 
his nature is love ; that there is a soul and that its nature 
is immortal ; that there is a destiny and that its essence is 
eternal life, we ask are these things Reasonable? And 
likewise, when we are told that God is wrathful with 
mankind ; that there is a Devil and man is his child, not 
God's ; that there was a fall and man is totally depraved 
thereby ; that there is a hell and sinful men are to suffer 
its torments endlessly, we simply ask are these things 
Reasonable? And in the lectures to come we will keep 
asking this question : Is this a Reasonable doctrine ? We 
will summon dogma after dogma to the bar of Reason, 
and demand its credentials, and then pass the verdict. 

Our quest is Truth. Our guide and authority is Rea- 
son. Our one desire is to "prove all things, in order that 
we may hold fast to that which is genuine and good." 

" Two angels guide 
The path of man, both aged and yet young, 
As angels are, ripening through endless years. 
On one he leans: some call her Memory, 
And some Tradition, and her voice is sweet 
With deep mysterious accords. The other, 
Floating above, holds down a lamp, which streams 
A light divine and searching on the earth 
Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, 
Yet clings with loving cheek, and shines anew, 
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp 
Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked 
But for Tradition. We walk evermore 
To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp." 



LECTURE II 

THE BIBLE 

"We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testa- 
ments contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, 
interest, and final destination of mankind." — Winchester Profession of 
Faith. 

The argument of the previous lecture is admirably 
summarized in these pointed words of James Martineau : 
" Reason for the rational ; conscience for the right — these 
are the sole organs for appreciating the last claims upon 
us, the courts of ultimate appeal, whose verdict it is not 
only weakness but treason to resist." 1 

" Evangelical " Christians have not yet come round 
to this point of view, but they are coming. There are 
some people in the world who pride themselves on saying, 
as Mr. Betteredge used to say, "I am (thank God) con- 
stitutionally superior to reason," but their number must 
steadily decrease and their confession must increasingly be 
to their shame. Impatience with the obstinate and the 
obtuse is beginning to manifest itself within the ranks of 
Orthodoxy. A distinguished Congregationalist clergyman 
recently said : 2 " On all other subjects besides religion, 
people are able to exercise their common sense. Why 
can they not use a modicum of the same common sense 
when they come to deal with religious truth ? " That is 
precisely the criticism we make and the question we 
raise. Indeed, how can we find out what is true unless 
we bring our Good Sense to bear upon the testimony 

1 Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 129. 2 Dr. Washington Gladden. 



THE BIBLE 17 

brought to our ears ? Here is a mass of information about 
religious things. Here are creeds upon creeds claiming 
to teach what is true of God and man, of duty and des- 
tiny. Here are books — sacred books of many nations and 
theological treatises of many theologians — all purporting 
to bring us certain trustworthy facts. Evidently they are 
all witnesses in religion. They cannot all be true nor is 
any one of them all true, for they contradict each other 
and even contradict themselves. How are we to know 
what part of this abundance of testimony to reject and 
what part to accept? Surely, we should be able to deter- 
mine. Surely, God has endowed us as rational creatures 
with ability to discriminate between truth and error in 
religion as in every other department of knowledge. The 
faculty which God has given us for this very end, is 
Reason. If we use it, and use it properly, it will lead us 
into all truth. One of the purposes of these lectures is 
to get people into the habit of using their Good Sense on 
religious problems, and to show them that only good can 
come to those who study the weightiest subjects in this 
manner. 

We begin our investigations with the Bible. We must 
determine certain things about it before we can hope to 
proceed on our course without friction. There are theories, 
clearly defined or hazy, in the Christian mind about the 
Bible that will keep rising up as obstacles if we do not 
encounter them at once and throw them aside forever. 

I. What the Bible is Not. It is important for 
us to learn what the Bible is not before we inform our- 
selves as to what it is. Rev. Washington Gladden, an 
orthodox clergyman, and therefore presumably familiar 
with the state of thought among ff evangelical " people, tells 



18 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

us that the doctrine of the Bible now held by the great 
majority of Christians is that given by Dr. Charles Hodge 
in his "Theology," as follows : 

" Protestants hold that the scriptures of the Old and New 
Testaments are the word of God, written under the inspira- 
tion of God, the Holy Ghost, and are therefore infallible, and 
consequently free from all error, whether of doctrine, of fact, 
or of precept. All the books of scripture are equally inspired. 
All alike are infallible in what they teach." Dr. Gladden 
adds that " Intelligent pastors do not hold this doctrine, but the 
body of the laity have no other conception." 1 

This is most unfortunate, and something ought to be 
done by all " intelligent pastors" to rid the minds of their 
people of doctrines like these which are not only palpably 
false but inherently harmful. I hope the following dis- 
cussion will help some layman or lay woman out of the~ 
bondage of error into the glorious liberty of the truth. 

Dr. Hodge's definition is very broad ; too broad to 
stand long. It covers three untenable dogmas : 1, Plenary 
and verbal inspiration. 2, Equal validity of all parts of 
the Bible. 3, Infallibility. Let us examine these claims : 

1. Plenary and verbal inspiration. "Plenary" 
means full, complete, absolute. Plenary inspiration is 
" that kind of inspiration which excludes all defects in the 
utterance of the inspired message." Verbal inspiration is 
"that kind of inspiration which extends to the very words 
and forms of expression of the divine message." Plenary 
and verbal inspiration imply that from one end of the 
Bible to the other there is not an error of any kind ; the 
thought and language, and even the punctuation, are 
God's, and therefore accurate and authoritative. God 
used the authors of the various books of the Bible as one 
might use a phonograph or stenographer. He talked into 
i " Who Wrote the Bible ? " p. 356. 



THE BIBLE 19 

Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others, and they repeated 
what he said. They were automatons. When God spake 
they spake, and not until ; what God spake they spake, 
and nothing else. Hence, the Bible is "the word of 
God " ; it is from God in almost the same sense as if it 
had been dropped from the sky just as it is. 

Now such teaching is rendered absurd by an examina- 
tion of the Bible itself, for (1) nowhere in the Bible is it 
claimed that God is the author of its various books ; and 
(2) there are errors in the Bible. 

Open your Bible and read it from beginning to end 
and find, if you can, any speaker or writer claiming to be 
the mere mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost. You cannot. 
But you can find testimony to the effect that the writer 
considered that he himself was composing what he wrote. 
Turn to the gospel of Luke, for instance, and read the 
first four verses. What do they say? This : 

' ; Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a 
narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled 
among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the 
beginning were eye witnesses and ministers of the word, it 
seemed good to me also, having traced the course of things 
accurately from the first, to write unto thee, in order, most 
excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty 
concerning the things wherein thou was instructed." 

Here, evidently, Luke considered that he himself was 
inditing his version of the Life of Christ. He makes no 
claim of being under the control of the Holy Ghost. 
There is a passage in Timothy often quoted in defense of 
the mechanical theory of inspiration. I allude to II. Tim. 
iii., 16 : "Every Scripture is inspired of God," etc. But 
the correct translation of this verse, as given in the 
Revised Version, is : " Every Scripture inspired of God is 



20 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

also profitable for teaching," etc. This leaves it an open 
question as to what scripture is inspired of God and what 
is not. Professor Ladd of Yale University says : 

"It is necessary to state again a fact that cannot be too often 
repeated. The Bible itself, from the first verse of Genesis 
to the last verse of Revelation, does not contain a single word 
to encourage the opinion that any special kind of inspiration 
was given to its writers in the act of writing, or to qualify 
them for writing. On the contrary, everything which the 
Bible actually does say discourages such an opinion." 

How plain it all is that God did not dictate the Bible 
when we examine it critically and reverently ! There 
are so many mistakes in language, in science, in history, 
in ethics and in prophecy, that it would make God imper- 
fect in his wisdom if we said he was responsible for them. 
A few errors, from the many that might be pointed out, 
will suffice to prove that the Bible is not plenarily nor 
verbally inspired : 

In II. Sam. xxiv. 1, we are told that the Lord moved 
David to number Israel and Judah ; the writer of I. Chron. 
xxi., 1, says that Satan moved David to number Israel. In I. 
Sam. xvii., the account is given of David's victory over 
Goliath ; in II. Sam. xxi., 19, we are told that Elhanan slew 
Goliath, and the writer of I. Chron. xx., 5, says that Elhanan 
slew Lahmi, the brother of Goliath. In Matt, xxvii., 9, cer- 
tain words are said to have been spoken by the prophet Jere- 
miah. They were spoken by Zechariah (Zech. xi., 13). In 
the story of the healing of the blind man at Jericho, Matthew 
and Mark expressly say that the healing took place as Christ 
was departing from the city ; Luke says that it was before 
he entered it. Matthew says there were two blind men ; 
Mark and Luke say that there was but one. Contradictions 
and errors like the above are numerous in the Bible. What do 
they show? That God makes mistakes, or that the Bible was 



THE BIBLE 21 

written by fallible men? Of course they are not serious errors, 
but the most trivial misstatement is sufficient to overthrow 
these claims of inerrancy and infallibility for the scriptures. 

Did it ever occur to the framers of these dogmas that 
although similar doctrines about the Old Testament were 
in vogue in Christ's day, he repudiated them? Jesus 
would not admit that the Old Testament was plenarily or 
verbally inspired. He sweepingly condemned many of its 
precepts, and superseded them with his own commands. 
"Ye have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a 
tooth for a tooth (Deut. xix., 21), but I say unto you, 
resist not evil." The fifth chapter of Matthew is filled 
with condemnations of the teaching and spirit of certain 
Old Testament precepts. He, then, who cannot and 
does not look upon the Bible as infallible is simply follow- 
ing in the footsteps of his leader, Jesus Christ ! 

2. Furthermore, it is evident that the books of the 
Bible are not of equal validity. The claim that " all the 
books of the Scriptures are equally inspired " has no founda- 
tion in fact. Do you mean to tell me that the Gospels 
are on the same level with Deuteronomy, and with Ecclesi- 
astes with its one-sided and mistaken view of life, and with 
that revengeful fiction of Esther ? Do you believe that the 
law of " an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth " is equal 
in its validity with Christ's law of non-retaliation? And 
yet that is the logic of the theory that equalizes all the 
books of the Bible in inspiration and authority. Any 
one whose thought is not hopelessly biased by a theory 
can see that all parts of the Bible are not equally inspired 
or of equal worth. 

Professor Ladd is frank enough to admit that ' ' Some 
writings of sacred Scripture are for laying the foundation of 
doctrine, and some are not suitable or wholly trustworthy for 



22 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

this use. There are degrees of divine insight which biblical 
writers display, grades of the completeness and of the imper- 
fection of the moral tenets they convey." 

These things are so clear to students of the Bible that 
the candid ones are acknowledging that the Bible is 
neither inerrable nor infallible. 

Rev. Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist of ability 
and renown, says: "The Bible is not an infallible book, in 
the sense in which it is popularly supposed to be infallible. 
It is not infallible historically. It is not infallible scientifically. 
It is not infallible morally. Not to recognize the partialness 
and imperfections of this record in all these respects is to be 
guilty of a grave disloyalty to the kingdom of truth." l 

Dr. Lyman Abbott has said: "For my part, I desire in 
this and every other matter to speak with perfect frankness. 
I disown the idea that the Bible is inerrant, and I disown the 
statement that it is infallible. I do not find anywhere in the 
Bible infallibility claimed by the Bible." 2 

Dr. Briggs, the great Presbyterian biblical scholar, has 
confessed that " It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in 
the sacred Scripture. Nevertheless, Historical Criticism finds 
them, and we must meet the issue, whether they destroy the 
authority of the Bible or not. It has been taught in recent 
years, and is still taught by some theologians, that one proved 
error destroys the authority of the Scripture. I shall venture 
to affirm that, so far as I can see, there are errors in the 
Scriptures that no one has been able to explain away; and 
the theory that they were not in the original text is sheer 
assumption, upon which no mind can rest with certainty. If 
such errors destroy the authority of the Bible it is already 
destroyed for historians. Men cannot shut their eyes to truth 
and fact." 3 

i " Who wrote the Bible," p. 352. 2 Christian Union, 1891. 

3 Inaugural Address. 



THE BIBLE 23 

Professor J. Henry Thayer, addressing an evangelical audi- 
ence in Boston, frankly said: "The critics are agreed that 
the view of Scripture in which you and I were educated, 
which has been prevalent in New England for generations, is 
untenable." 

Thus have the idols of verbal inspiration, equal validity 
and infallibility, fallen to pieces under the blows of intelli- 
gent and fearless orthodox scholars ! Why, friends, these 
doctrines were not believed in Christ's day ; they were not 
taught by the early apostles ; they were not held by the 
leaders of the Reformation or the early reformers. They 
did not come into existence until the seventeenth century. 
Listen to Professor Tholuck's description of the origin of 
an infallible Scripture : 

" In proportion as controversy, sharpened by Jesuitism, 
made the Protestant party sensible of an externally fortified 
ground of combat, in that same proportion did Protestantism 
seek, by the exaltation of the outward authoritative character 
of the sacred writings, to recover that infallible authority 
which it had lost through its rejection of infallible councils and 
the infallible authority of the Pope. In this manner arose, 
not earlier than the seventeenth century, those sentiments which 
regarded the Holy Scripture as the infallible production of the 
divine spirit — in its entire contents and form — so that not only 
the sense of the words, but the letters, the Hebrew vowel points, 
and the very pronunciation were regarded as proceeding from 
the Spirit of God." 

The lateness of the origin of these doctrines about the 
Bible is significant, and the fact that they originated in the 
heat of controversy and for polemical purposes warrants 
us in eying them with suspicion, and the considerations 
adduced compel us to reject them. 

Now a host of questions and objections will be raised 
by the reader. Some one will say, "If the Bible is 
inspired at all, it is infallible." Not necessarily. "In- 



24 GOOD SENSE IX RELIGION 

spiration," as Professor Ladd says, "is not infallibility; 
and the claim that it guarantees infallibility of any kind 
is most distinctly denied." Another will say, "Well, if 
you show that the Bible is not infallible, you destroy its 
authority." Not so. We simply discredit any claim to 
infallible authority made for it. Another will say, "If 
you prove that there are errors in the Bible, you render 
everything in it worthless to me. When I reject a part 
of the Scripture, I shall be in a fair way to reject all." 
What logic ! The Bible makes no claim of its own to 
being infallible, and, therefore, to prove it fallible is not 
to make it a fraud, or unreliable. The stigma rests on 
those that make such a claim for it. And furthermore, 
that which is not infallible is not necessarily worthless. 
Your watch is not infallible ; is it, then, worthless as ar 
time-piece ? Your physician is not infallible ; is his 
advice and medicine therefore worthless? Bancroft's 
History of the United States is not infallible ; do you 
then discredit every statement in it? Surely not. Then 
why think that the Bible, when shown to be fallible, to 
contain errors, is worthless? Infallibility and inerrancy 
are not necessary in order to have genuineness, truth, and 
worth. The value of the Bible depends on the truth hi it : 
the insight that its writers display into verities ; the 
knowledge that they show of the character of God and 
the duty and destiny of man. 'The Bible," as a witty 
Catholic has said, "is to teach us how to go to heaven, 
not how the heavens go." If it makes mistakes in astron- 
omy, as it surely does, where it says that Joshua made 
the sun stand still, as if the sun moved ! I say, if it 
makes mistakes in astronomy, it does not follow that it 
makes blunders in morality. In this field it may be very 
accurate, and therefore an authority. 



THE BIBLE 25 

"As the physical and historical errors in Shakespeare do 
not mar i he aesthetic truth which Shakespeare meant to convey, 
or destroy the moral effect of his dramas, so any physical, his- 
torical, scientific or ethical errors that may be found in the 
Bible do not mar the religious truth which the Bible is intended 
to convey or hinder its religious effect." 

But these errors irreparably break down the dogmas 
of plenary and verbal inspiration, equal validity^ and 
infallibility ', as any one who uses his Good Sense 

mUSt sec. 

II. What the Bible Is. Having discussed the 
negative aspects of this subject, and shown what the Bible 
is not, I come to the positive side of my theme, which I 
assure the reader is much more agreeable to me, as I do 
not like destructive criticism. We now proceed to deter- 
mine what the Bible is ; to note the Universalis! and 
(iood Sense view of it. 

In the first place, the J>ihh' is clearly a literature. 
It is not the "Word of God," as that phrase is commonly 
used by those who believe in its verbal inspiration and 
infallibility. Said Robert J. Horton, one of the Leading 
preachers of London, to the students in the Congrega- 
tional Divinity School, of Vale University: 

"There is no foundation in tin- Bible itself for tin- common 
practice of speaking of it as the Word of God. Boldly challenge 

those who thoughtlessly employ the term. Ask them : What 
reason have you lor the presupposition, what, support in Script- 
ure, what assurance of prophet or apostle, what, hint, of the 
Lord Himself, that this collection of writings may he fitly 
described by so august a name? Startled as many good people 

are by the question, they yet, if they he honest, are hound to 
admit that the usage is without Scriptural authority; if they 
arc dishonest, they angrily turn upon those who put the ques- 
tion and denounce them as infidels." 

Clearly the Bible "is not properly a hook, but, a liter- 



26 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

ature, composed of sixty-six books, written originally in at 
least three different languages. These books are the work 
of many authors, a few of whom are known with certainty 
and a few others with a high degree of probability, but a 
large number of whom are unknown and now, apparently, 
unknowable. This literature, the Bible, the product of 
such diverse authorship, is the result of slow growth, 
frequent editings, and much sifting. It is composed of 
history, biography, and the didactic or poetical expression 
of human experience. It contains myth, legend, tradition, 
story, annals, poems, prophetic rhapsody, sermon, proverb, 
simple narrative, picturesque parable, personal epistle and 
mystical apocalypse. Almost all of it is the record of 
human experience, but with this distinguishing and domi- 
nant quality — it is man's experience of God." 

In the second place, while the Bible is literature 
written by men, for men, and in the language of men, it is 
inspired literature. It is not, as we have seen, verbally 
inspired, but it plainly contains the thoughts, and records 
the experiences of men who knew God and lived in the 
spiritual realm. It breathes of God. The men of the 
Bible are inspired rather than their language. Inspira- 
tion in the primary and only strictly appropriate meaning 
of the word applies to persons and to persons only. 
"Inspiration is the influence of the Spirit of God on the 
spirit of man. It vivifies, it clarifies, it enables man to see 
as otherwise he could not." "Revelation is what he sees 
under inspiration." "Revelation is the revealing — that is, 
unveiling, and the veil is not over the face of God. It is 
over the face of the human soul. I do not know God in 
his fullness, not because he veils himself but because I am 
veiled." The Bible is a record of the experiences of the 
men who lifted the veil from their own souls, and saw the 



THE BIBLE 27 

things that God had revealed of himself. Thus the Bible 
is not only an inspired literature, but it is a revelation. 
It helps us draw aside the veil and see God. And yet it 
does not stand alone in these particulars ; other sacred 
literature is of the same nature. The Vedas, the Tripitaka, 
the A vesta, the Frve Kings, and the Koran also lift the 
veil and let their readers see something of God and duty 
and destiny. "It cannot be that the new commandment 
of brotherly love was inspired when uttered by Christ and 
was not inspired when uttered by Confucius." l The Bible 
differs from other sacred writings simply in the larger 
revelation it contains. The Jews and the Christians saw 
more of God and his purposes than any other people, and 
therefore the Bible, which contains the record of what 
they saw, is superior to and must take the place of all 
other sacred writings ; it fulfills them as Christianity ful- 
fills all other religions. 

In the third place, the Bible is an inspired literature 
which must be interpreted. "It must be interpreted 
grammatically and historically, as all other writings must 
be interpreted." Owing to the human and divine ele- 
ments in it, and the errors mixed in with and in some 
cases overlaying its truth, it must be studied critically, 
though reverently, and its claims and teachings put upon 
their proper basis. Scholarship has its field, and is doing 
finely ; the individual Christian has his province, and he 
should occupy it. He is not to defer to the opinion of 
any Commentator, Creed, or Church, but he is to use his 
own mind, relying upon Reason to guide him into all 
truth. Reason is the great interpreter. Man can rely 
upon it. He should rely on it. It will help him to dis- 
tinguish truth from error ; the word of God from the 

1 Professor Alfred Momerie. 



28 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

words and guesses of men. The Universalist condemns 
that method of interpreting the Bible which seizes upon 
isolated texts and forces them to support a preconceived 
theory, or makes them yield a doctrine out of harmony 
with the general teaching of an individual epistle or in 
discord with the trend of the whole Scripture. There 
is a unity of thought and trend in this Bible ; a majestic 
sweep of truth bearing everything before it toward one 
sublime conclusion, and we hold that this main idea and 
main purport be kept in mind constantly by those who 
interpret single texts and particular passages or books. 
We make texts that contradict or oppose this central 
thought and dominant spirit of the Bible, go before us 
or stand aside as we pass by. 

Now, in regarding the Bible as inspired literature ancL 
in interpreting it in these rational, common-sense ways — 
methods that men employ when they take up the sacred 
writings of any other people or prophet — the Univer- 
salist arrives at certain conclusions respecting the 
Bible, and he states them in his creed as follows : 

" We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New 
Testaments contain a revelation of the character of God, and 
of the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind." 

Upon examining these statements you see that the 
Universalist believes that the Bible contains a revelation 
of these things. A jug contains water and oil, but the 
jug is not the water and the oil, nor is the contents of the 
jug all water or all oil. The Bible contains a revelation 
of God, but the Bible is not the revelation of God, nor 
is all that the Bible contains a revelation of God. We 
distinguish between the contents of a thing and the thing 
itself ; and we recognize that the contents may be made 
up of mixed elements. 






THE BIBLE 21) 

Furthermore, we believe that the Bible contains a 
revelation, not the only revelation. We fin<l some truths 
written in the hook of Nature. "Day unto day uttereth 
speech, night unto night showeth knowledge" of God, 
duty, destiny. \V e discover that other religious writings 
contain some revelations of God. We find that the Vedas 
of the Brahmins, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the 
Avesta of the Persians, the Chinese Sacred Books of Con- 
fucius, and the Koran of Mahomet throw light on the 
character of God, and on the duty and destiny of man. 
But we find this to he a tact, that no other sacred liter- 
ature in the world, yes, all other sacred writings com- 
bined, do not contain as much truth on these greal subjects 
as this Bible. It includes everything that is good in other 
religious hooks, and omits much of their evil. And yet 
we do not hold that the Bible finishes the revelation of 
God, duty, and destiny. Paid said "We know in part," 
and so says the Universalist, and he seeks to know in full 
by not " confounding the gospel with the Bible, which is 
only a witness of the gospel," and by not falling into the 
error of thinking that the Bible exhausts tin; word of (iod, 
as though God speaks no word in history, in nature, in 
conscience, hut by holding his mind open to truth yet to 
he discovered, willing to accept it, no matter whence its 
source. When we say that we believe the Bible contains 
a revelation^ we mean that it hears witness to certain 
facts about God, and about man's duty and his destiny. 
We believe that the Bible, through the examples it t 
sents, through the history it traces, and throuuV re - 
precepts it gives, lifts the veil and shows men Certain 
verities. These things are accepted as realities becau? 
they commend themselves to our ' on and conscier 
and we know we are le $>Aze it > facts and listeni- ks, 



30 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

truths. A revelation is supposed to be trustworthy, but 
we allow it only as it shows itself worthy to be trusted, 
and it does this by being true to the facts and wholesome 
to mankind. Truth is nothing more nor less than cor- 
respondence to fact ; and the testimony of the Bible is 
received by us as truth just so far as Reason decides that 
it corresponds to the facts. To be sure, we accept some 
things on faith, where we cannot know all or any of the 
facts, but faith is but a name for the approval of Reason 
in matters where such evidence as we have, although not 
enough for belief, is adjudged sufficient for trust. So that 
Reason is the great judge, and ho allows the Bible an 
authoritative voice in so far as it speaks the truth. He 
says the authority of the Bible depends on the truth 
within it and not on any theory about it. 

And as we study the Bible we believe that it bears 
witness to certain great and grand truths concerning the 
character of God, and about the duty, interest, and final 
destination of mankind. These truths will be elaborated 
and established in subsequent lectures. But it will be 
well to give their substance to-night. The God which 
the Bible reveals to us is a personal being, a spirit, who is 
all-wise and all-powerful. He made the universe, and He 
alone. His nature is love, and all that He does is good. 
He is, however, just, and moreover, merciful, leaning, if 
He leans at all, on the side of mercy rather than severity. 
He is not only the creator of the universe, He is the father 
• v£ mankind. He loves men as a parent loves his offspring, 
of (!A r M cnes over humanity as a mother bends over and 
caress r j ier fi rs t ] 3a l 3e> JJ e grieves when men are disobe- 

^dr! ient ' ^-ts for them as they go into the regions of sin 

'., of waste their su ^ce in riotous living; He welcomes 

t^ el \ii home again wht n thev return with eyes downcast 



% 




THE BIBLE 31 

and with prayers for forgiveness on their lips. He for- 
gives all the iniquities of men ; He helps them to live 
righteously. In a sentence, the God of the Bible loves 
and looks after men as the Eastern shepherd loves and 
looks after his sheep, ever going before them and ever 
showing them the way that shall ultimately lead them to 
green pastures beside still waters. Thus do the Univer- 
salists interpret the character of God as taught by the 
Bible — a God who is a personal spirit ; a God who is 
just ; a God who is merciful ; a God who is loving ; a God 
who is forgiving ; and above all, a God who is the Father, 
and Educator, and Perfecter of mankind. 

And we also learn that the duty of man is to love this 
God with his whole nature, and to love his fellow-men, 
having the same regard for their welfare that he has for 
his own. We find that the chief interest of man is to seek 
first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And 
we rejoice in discovering that the final destination of 
mankind is perfection ; perfection for the individual and 
perfection for the race, a destiny so well expressed in those 
words of Paul : " Till we all come . . . unto a perfect man, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 

These are the views that the Universalis! holds con- 
cerning the Bible, and these are the doctrines which he 
finds in it that accord with his reason and satisfy his 
emotions. Our head and our heart accept these doctrines, 
and we believe them confidently and draw from them 
inspiration to better living and nobler hoping. 

And in view of these revelations, the Bible is a pre- 
cious book to us. We get our faith out of it, and rest 
most of our teachings upon it. It is in our pulpits every- 
where, and in all our homes. 

We love the Bible and prize it above all other books, 



32 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

not for some magical power hidden within it or surrounding' 
it, making it a passport to heaven ; and not because its con- 
tents are thought to be infallible ; but because of the reason- 
ableness of the great, vital truths it brings to every open 
mind ; because of the great example it gives in the life of 
Jesus Christ to every person who is seeking to know his duty 
and attain his destiny ; and because of the mighty influence 
for good that its teachings have had on civilization and 
humanity. 

We trust the Bible. Its errors of detail and its incom- 
pleteness of doctrine do not injure our faith in the truthful- 
ness and trustworthiness of its substance and the accuracy 
of its trend. The destruction which sound and reverent 
criticism is wreaking within it, does not destroy its author- 
ity for us, simply because we recognize that it bears witness 
to certain truths ; great, fundamental, permanent truths ; 
and upon these verities we stand as upon rocks which 
cannot be removed forever ! The essential thought of the 
Bible suffices us. We draw our inspiration and best 
spiritual life from the current of truth that flows steadily on 
from Genesis to the Gospels, growing purer and broader 
as it reaches and merges in the flood of Christ's great 
life. This undercurrent is living water to us; it slakes 
our spiritual thirst; it builds up our character; we dip 
deeply and drink freely. 

We recommend the Bible. We call unto men who have 
gone from its well-springs of life because theologians have 
walled it in, or have been driven from it because religious 
bigots have vitiated its waters, — we call unto such men to 
come back and taste again and see that its waters are sweet ; 
to come to this fountain as we come to it, and see if it does 
Dot yield them wine and milk, and become in them a well 
of living water springing up unto Eternal Life ! 



LECTURE III 

GOD 

STANDING on the island of Time, encompassed with 
the waters of Eternity, listening to the booming breakers 
of the Past, and gazing upon the rolling billows of the 
Future, there arises in the mind of man three solemn 
questions : Whence ? Why ? Whither ? Whence came 
this island? Why am I upon it? Whither am I going? 

In order of time, and, perhaps, in order of impor- 
tance is the question, Whence ? What or who made the 
island — this sphere that floats on the bosom of space? 
What or who covered it with its turf, its vegetation, its 
fruit, its seas and its mountains? What or who called 
into existence its myriad people — the fishes in its seas, the 
birds in its air, the reptiles and the quadrupeds upon its 
land? Whence all these things, and whence, Man? 
What or who put him here, with his thoughts, and emo- 
tions, his questionings, his doubts, his hopes, his loves? 

Man has raised these questions from time immemo- 
rial — the remotest and faintest voice that speaks to us 
down the corridors of history, repeats this old, old ques- 
tion : Whence ? a question that becomes more earnest as 
man becomes more thoughtful ; a question that demands 
an answer as man becomes more enlightened. You can- 
not put him off with a wave of the hand, or by a simple 
"don't know." He cannot overcome, however hard he 
may try, the craving to know the Origin of the Universe, 
and of himself in particular. Must he be left in doubt 



34 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

on this subject? I believe not. I believe this Universe 
must bear marks of its origin. There must be traces here 
and there which can be followed out until something 
certain is reached. Why not go to work on the problem, 
rather than merely raise questions ? Why not investigate 
things, instead of sitting still and sighing? Why not reach 
a conviction instead of holding an opinion or remaining 
agnostic ? 

Let us use our reason a minute. Here is the Universe ; 
it is a fact. How came it here ? There are but two pos- 
sible explanations : It is either the result of chance ; or 
the product of intelligence. There can be no other theo- 
ries as to its origin. The Universe is either accidental or 
intentional. Let us start with these hypotheses, and see 
which of them best explains the facts. 

The Doctrine of a Chance Universe means that 
all things are what they are because they happen to be as 
they are. Long ago, there existed an atom or a number 
of atoms. These were thrown together in some idle way, 
and in the course of ages by happy concoursing they took 
on the forms and shapes of this world. No superintend- 
ing hand guided their movements ; no contriving mind 
fashioned their product. They of themselves, by attrac- 
tion and repulsion, jostled out this universe. 

This is a preposterous doctrine, as the least reflection 
and investigation shows. Suppose I were to bring you a 
bag of type, which I had got at the printer's ; and a com- 
plete set of Shakespeare's writings, procured from the 
library. Now, suppose that I were to tell you that by 
merely shaking those types together in that bag, and 
tumbling them out on the floor, time after time, I had 
succeeded in composing the works of Shakespeare. What 
would you immediately say ? You would say : It is 



GOD 35 

incredible ; I cannot believe it ! And yet to claim that 
the poems and plays of Shakespeare were or could be 
produced by chance, by accident, by the blind jostling and 
throwing of types, is a modest and reasonable claim com- 
pared with the claim that this Universe was produced in 
an accidental and fortuitous way. The chances against 
such an event are simply innumerable. An eminent 
mathematician says that all the paper ever made or that 
can ever be made would not hold the figures which show 
the chances against such a universe. 

Of course, no hypothesis would be incredible, how- 
ever multitudinous the chances against it, if it were the 
only hypothesis ; but where there are two suppositions, 
then the one with the least title to probability, is set aside. 
Hence, thoughtful men of every class are giving up the 
theory that this universe is the result of accident. And 
the only other hypothesis, namely that it is the product of 
intelligence, is gaining in favor. 

The Doctrine of a Contrived Universe holds 
that everything is the product of intelligence ; that there is 
a Mind which conceived and created this Universe, and is 
superintending and guiding all its movements. 

This doctrine bears the impress of truth upon its face. 
It looks plausible. It sounds rational. For it is difficult 
to conceive how such an orderly world as this could have 
been produced by a chaotic and disorderly crew of atoms ; 
and still more inconceivable is it to account for mind in 
humanity without mind in that which produced man. Xo 
effect can be greater than its cause, and every effect will 
generally bear resemblance to its cause, hence it seems 
probable that thought and love in the universe must reflect 
or express thought and love in that which made the 
universe. But we will not accept a theory because it is 



36 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

plausible. We will try to make it highly probable, and 
certain, if possible. 

To this end, let us ask the aid of Science and Theology. 
It has been too long supposed that Science and Religion 
were antagonistic. Such is not the fact, as scientists and 
religionists are beginning to see. Between true science 
and true religion there ought to be the friendliest feeling. 
They are working in the interest of the same Lord and 
Master, Truth. Religion is the more comprehensive 
seeker, and it summons to its aid every other agent or 
agency. Science should be one of the handmaids of 
religion, as is philosophy and theology. And science will 
be taken into the service of religion more and more as the 
days multiply and her competency to teach truth is seen 
and admitted. 

Now what does Science do for those who believe that 
this Universe is the product of intelligence ? I will give 
her testimony in brief : 1 . She demonstrates that the Uni- 
verse is & product. She shows, beyond all doubt, that it 
is not eternal ; that there was a time when it did not exist 
in its present form. Scientists agree that the Universe is 
an effect. 2. She has practically demonstrated that the 
Universe has been evolved, not made outright, either as a 
whole or in parts. The Universe has grown like a flower, 
it has not been manufactured like a watch. The law of 
evolution is almost as well established now as is the law of 
gravitation, and it is almost as widely accepted by scien- 
tific men. 3. Science shows that the Universe is but a 
form of motion. All things exist in one of three states, 
solid, liquid or gaseous ; and these states are but forms of 
motion, either rectilinear, rotary or vibratory, simple or 
combined. As everything is an expression of motion, all 
things can be resolved into motion, just as a piece of coal 



GOD 37 

under proper conditions vanishes into heat — heat being 
nothing: more or less than a kind of motion. 4. Science 
shows that the Universe is a unity. In that everything is 
in essence, motion, all things must be alike in the final 
analysis. If the universe could go back at once to its 
original condition, it would be a nebulous, homogeneous 
mass. These are some of the facts which Science gives 
us, namely, that the universe is an effect ; that it has been 
evolved ; that its original and permanent condition is 
motion ; and that, in spite of its seeming diversity, it is 
uniform and a unity. 

If you ask the scientist what he finds the first cause of 
the Universe to be he will answer, motion or energy ; he 
will say, that so far as I can see through my scientific 
glasses, there is an infinite energy from which all things 
proceed. It is not in his province to account for this 
energy, or force, or motion as it is variously called ; he 
properly leaves that to the philosopher and theologian. 

And they continue the search — the philosopher for 
truth ; the theologian, for God. And they both pause 
before the facts discovered by science, and observe their 
significance. If the universe is an effect, then there must 
be a cause ; if there is unity in the effect, there must be 
unity in the cause, therefore there must be but one cause ; 
if the universe is the effect of motion, there is doubtless a 
mover, for . motion cannot generate itself, and therefore 
there must be a first or prime cause. By some such process 
as this does the theologian and philosopher work from the 
data of science to the conclusions of religion. 

Motion is the bridge by which theology travels from 
the first cause as established by science to the final cause 
as established by philosophy. And it is done in this way. 
We know that so far as hitman experience goes all volun- 



38 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

tary action is the result of will-power. If I lift my arm, 
it is because of will-power ; if I run or leap, it is because 
my will gives me permission and assistance. All motions 
that human beings set going within or outside themselves, 
can be traced to the action of the Will and to no other 
faculty. If this be so in human activity, why may it not 
be so in regard to the activity of the universe? To what 
else can we trace the motion of the universe than to an 
infinite Will which generates it ? This is what the theo- 
logian does, and he says that "the infinite and eternal 
energy from which all things proceed," is Will. 

But he does not stop here. In human experience we 
always find the will associated with two other faculties, 
namely, that of thinking and that of feeling. Hence, it may 
prove that this infinite and eternal will is also associated 
with the faculties of thinking and feeling. And straight- 
way the universe is investigated to see if it bears marks of 
thought ; and to see if it shows that its maker feels. And 
after patient study, the theologian says that the universe 
is covered with traces of a thoughtful creator, and is 
filled with evidences of his love. Hence, it is held confi- 
dently that the infinite and eternal energy from which all 
things proceed, possesses not only a will, but the faculty 
of thinking and the power of feeling as well. And what 
is this but to say that the first and final cause of all things 
is Mind, for mind is made up of these faculties of knowing 
and feeling and willing. And is this process anything 
short of proving that the Universe is the product of intel- 
ligence and not of chance ? 

But you say, you have not shown us any marks of 
thought, or any traces of feeling in the universe ! Is it 
necessary ? Can you not find them yourself? Have you 
thoughts? If so, where did they come from? Do you 



have arl I s 5 If so, whence their origin? Can yon 
attribute them to any other source than an infinite and 
nal thinker and lover? Do yon never exclaim with 
I, I think thy thoughts after thee!"* It 
you want evidences of thought and design in the physical 
w«.rld. they are nut hard to find. <t forth this winter 
night and look upon the frozen earth and ice-bound pond, 
and vnii will observe one provision which is singidar and 
significant, and leads inevitably to the conclusion that a 
thoughtful and wise being made it. I refer to the law by 
which water eay low the freezing point, instead of 

contracting. 

•• This is x optional. Generally, bodies are t '-/heat 

and contracted by col '. Water itself follows this general law 
at all temperatures abov - As its surface becomes cooled, 

the chilled, and therefore heavier portions, sink toward the 
bottom, causing a circulation till the whole mass has sunk to 
40°. From this point it becomes lighter by further cooling, and 
the cooled portion remains on top. At 32 : it frees b. P: - 
feaso] -oke states the result: Then comes into play still 
another provision in the properties of water. Most substa - 
are heavier in their solid than in their liquid state : but ice, on 
the contrary, is lighter than water, and therefore floats on its 
surface. Moreover, as ice is a very poor conductor of heat, 
it server as a protection to the lake, so that at the depth I : 

m -:. the temperature of the water during winter 
is never under 40°, although the atmosphere may continue for 
weeks below zero. If water resembled other liquids, and con- 
tinued to contract with cold to its freezing point — if this excep- 
tion had not been made in favor of water, the whole order 
of nature would have been reversed. The circulation just 
- :ibed would continue until the whole mass of water in the 
lake had fallen to the freezing point. The ice would then tirst 
form at the bottom, and the congelation would continue until 
the whole lake had been changed into one mass ot solid ice. 



40 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Upon such a mass, the hottest summer would produce but little 
effect ; for the poor conducting power would then prevent its 
melting, and instead of ponds and lakes we should have large 
masses of ice, which during the summer would melt on the 
surface to a depth of only a few feet. It is unnecessary to 
state that this condition of things would be utterly inconsistent 
with the existence of aquatic plants or animals, and it would 
be almost as fatal to organic life everywhere, for not only are all 
parts of the creation so indissolubly bound together that if one 
member suffers all the other members suffer with it, but, 
moreover, the soil itself would, to a certain extent, share in the 
fate of the ponds. The soil is always more or less saturated 
with water, and, under existing conditions in our temperate 
zone, the frost does not penetrate to a sufficient depth to kill 
the roots and seeds of plants which are buried under it. But 
were water constituted like other liquids, the soil would remain 
frozen to the depth of many feet, and the only effect of the 
summer's heat would be to melt a few inches at the surface. 
It would be, perhaps, possible to cultivate some hardy annuals 
in such a climate, but this would be all. Trees and shrubs 
could not brave the severity of the winter. Thus, then, it 
appears that the very existence of life in these temperate regions 
of the earth depends on an apparent exception to a general law 
of nature, so slight and so limited in its extent that it can only 
be detected by the most refined scientific observation." ! 

Could anything be more expressive of intention and 
thoug htf illness on the part of the creator of the universe 
and its laws ? And does not this provision show wisdom 
and love, as well as mere sagacity? Nature is crowded 
with such marks of thought ; such wise provisions in 
behalf of its creatures. So plain is this fact, that Dr. 
Dewey said in his famous lectures on Human Destiny : 

' ' I will only say that if any instructed man can look upon 
himself or upon the universe around him ; if he can ascend 

1 Valentine's "Natural Theology," pp. 136, 137. 



GOD 41 

and dwell in thought amidst the countless millions of stars, or 
if he can take into his scope but the breadth of a summer's 
day, from the time when it touches the eastern hills with fire, 
to its soft and fading close ; all its loveliness, its wealth and 
wonder of beauty, its domain crowded with thousand-fold 
life, — life clothing the mountain side, springing in the valley, 
singing and making melody through all the round of earth, 
and air, and waters ; or if he can take any little plot of ground 
by his side, and study all its vegetable growth and insect life, 
and all that it drinks in from fostering nature around, all that 
it borrows from the ocean deep, and from the pavilion of the 
sun, to deck its flowery margin ; if, in a word, any instructed 
man can read the handwriting that is written all over the great 
tablet of the Universe, and not feel that it expresses a Mind — 
an Intelligence, a Wisdom, a love unbounded and unspeakable, 
I am astounded. I judge that there is no such man here or 
anywhere. Why, if one found inscribed upon some Rosetta 
stone, or upon the ribbed rocks of a desert mountain, but five 
such sentences as I am noAv uttering, he would say, without 
any doubt, ' Some intelligent being has done this ; some mind 
placed these words thus, one after another.' And does the 
infinite volume of the universe give less assurance of a devis- 
ing Intelligence?" 

It is by such reasoning and on such evidence that the 
theologian maintains that the Universe is the creation of 
Mind, and he calls the creative Mind, God. And to the 
untutored savage and the civilized inquirer he brings the 
glad tidings that man is not a creature of chance nor the 
victim of delusive hopes. In this way, the great question 
of Whence is answered from a scientific and philosophic 
point of view. The whole tenor of the Bible goes to 
corroborate these conclusions. Thus the voices of science, 
and theology, and scripture, unite in saying that the 
Universe and Man came from God. 

Xow, it is frequently asked, whether this God is a 



42 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

personal being or not. Such a question is like asking* 
whether a being who has a mind, is a personal being or 
not. Of course he is. What is a person, in the strict 
meaning of that word ? A person is not a mere living 
organism, not a mere Thing. A worm is not a per- 
son ; a dog is not a person ; an idiot is not a person. 
A person is a self-conscious, intelligent, self-determining 
power. To be a person one must know that he exists, 
he must be rational, and he must have freedom of the 
will. These powers belong to every healthy mind, and 
if God is Mind these powers are his, and he is therefore 
a Person. But this does not mean that God looks 
like a man or any other object conceivable by man. 
Indeed it is impossible to picture to ourselves what our 
own or anybody's else Mind looks like : how then do we 
dream of forming a picture of the Infinite Mind ? If God 
were impersonal, it would simply reduce him to a blind, 
unfeeling, and uncaring energy. God is a spirit ; but he 
is a personal spirit, that is, he is self-conscious, intelligent, 
and free-willed. 

Now, when we have learned that the universe was 
made by Mind, we immediately want to know Why? 
It is as natural for us to ask this question as it is for us 
to crave a knowledge of Whence. We know that if the 
universe was made by a Mind, it was made for a purpose, 
because it is characteristic of Mind, especially minds of 
the highest type, to do everything with an object in view. 
Hence, you and I and all men want to know why this 
universe, and man in particular, are here? Is there any 
goal ? or do all things go round in a meaningless circle ? 
Did the creative Mind make this world, and then desert it? 
or is he in it, working out some great purpose ? Is the 



GOD 43 

Universe a mighty watch, which was made and wound up 
in the long ago and whirled off into space to tick out its 
length? or is it an organism, in which its Organizer 
dwells, and through which he pours his life, and by which 
he expresses his thought and love? 

We turn to Science, and she helps us with our problem. 
The laAv of evolution which she has established becomes 
significant ; it is vocal ; it says that there is " one far-off 
divine event toward which the whole creation moves." 
Things do not go round in a meaningless circle ; they may 
circle at times, but like the eddies of the river, they are 
moving with the current that ever sweeps onward. Some 
have feared that evolution would dispense with God. 
Foolish fear ! Just as foolish as the old dread that grav- 
itation would banish God from his universe. When we 
understand that evolution is not a cause of anything, but 
a method by which the First Cause works, then we will 
not think that the method will do away with him who 
uses it. And what is the lesson science teaches on the 
basis of this law of evolution? She points to geology, 
and shows that the physical universe labored long and 
successfully to bring forth and nourish life ; she points to 
biology, and shows that the animate creation worked 
steadily and successfully until it brought forth man; she 
points to psychology, and teaches that the mental man is 
slowly but surely evolving the moral man ; and she points 
to ethics, and shows that the moral man is becoming and 
is to become the religious, or righteous, that is, perfect 
man. In this ascending wav Science teaches that the goal 
of creation — -the supreme end toward which everything 
has been and is contributing and moving — is the perfecting 
of humanity. This is the teaching of evolution. Do you 
then discredit the law ? Do you fear its implications and 



44 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

results ? Nay : it makes beautiful the feet of our God ; 
its voice is prophetic ; and in view of what it has already 
said and done, the capable and candid men of science and 
of religion are ready to say, with John Fiske : 

" In the story of evolution, we see all things working 
together, through countless ages of toil and trouble, toward 
one glorious consummation. . . . The glorious consummation 
toward which organic evolution is tending is the production of 
the highest and most perfect psychical life." " Not the produc- 
tion of any higher creature, but the perfecting of humanity, is 
to be the glorious consummation of Nature's long and tedious 
work." 

This, then, is the manifest purpose of God in creation, — 
the perfecting of Man. Science assures us that such is the 
goal. The Bible bears witness to the same great fact. 
Paul sums up the teaching of scripture in several phrases : 
"For we know that the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain with us until now." "The earnest 
expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of 
the sons of God." "Till we all attain unto a full-grown 
man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
Christ." This is Why the universe is here, — that it might 
bring forth Man. And this is Whither man is bound, — 
toward perfection. 

Now I have conducted you along this line of thought, 
rather than other lines that I might have pursued, advisedly. 
I opened these lectures with a plea for the use of reason 
in religion, and to-night rather than merely dogmatize 
about the existence of God, I have tried to show how 
reasonable, yes, how inevitable, it is to believe in His 
existence ; and how difficult, if not unreasonable, it is to 
believe that any other than an intelligent power made this 
universe. I submit what I have said to every thoughtful 



GOD 45 

and candid mind, and I believe that it will start a train 
of thought which will not stop short of the destination 
reached by those who firmly and joyously believe in God's 
existence and providence. I have not taken time to show 
that God is infinite, eternal, perfect, all-powerful, all- wise, 
and everywhere-present, simply because these things are 
presupposed in a being who could make such a universe 
as this is and control and guide it as it is evidently being 
controlled and guided. Neither have I sought to show, 
in view of the unity and subordination of the universe, 
that there can be no such being as a personal devil, either 
co-equal or co-eternal with God. You will arrive at that 
conclusion unaided, although I will assist you in my 
lecture on Man, where we touch upon the problem of 
evil. These themes, attractive as they are, have been put 
aside to make room for the one aim uppermost in my 
mind, namely, to show that a personal God, and not blind 
chance, is the creator of this Universe, and to suggest that 
he has a sublime object in creation, namely, the perfecting 
of man. 

This object of God in creation has a bearing on what 
follows. It helps one quickly and easily to perceive two 
things: 1, the worth of man; and 2, God's relation to 
him and His attitude towards him. 

1 . What must we think of the value of the human soul 
in that we see that God has deemed it worth while to 
create this universe and arrange its laws and control its 
energies solely for the evolution and perfecting of that 
human soul ! How precious in God's sight is man ; how 
dear to His heart must noble men and noble women be ! 
I have sometimes thought man a most presuming creature 
to think that he occupied any space in the Creator's 
thought ; to think that his prayers had any influence on 



46 GOOD SENSE IX RELIGION 

the Almighty ; to think that his life and conduct and 
destiny were of any concern to God. But I have such 
thoughts no more, simply because science, and philosophy, 
and theology and scripture, and every other voice in the 
universe bears witness that man is not only the crown and 
glory of creation, but that he is the chief object of God's 
interest and solicitude. 

2 . And in view of this regard for man which God does 
not seem to have for any other object in his universe, it 
must be that God is related to man as he is to no other 
creature. There is doubtless some bond of unity between 
God and man ; something that evokes this interest and 
favor from on high and makes man worthy the eminence 
he occupies. And as we study man, in the light of our 
knowledge of God, we discover that this bond between 
God and man is man's nature. Man is by nature like 
God. We know this, not merely because the Bible 
declares it, but because man has the reasoning faculty and 
freedom of the will, powers which no other created thing 
possesses. With the single exception of man, God is the 
only other being with these lofty and wonderful faculties. 
He has given them to man, and thus made man in His 
own image ; endowed him with the sublimest attributes 
of His own divine nature, thereby constituting man His 
child, and binding Himself to him by all the tender and 
eternal and responsible ties of Fatherhood. Thus have 
we a philosophical warrant for believing God to be the 
Father, as well as the Creator, of mankind. Men are the 
children of God ; His offspring in a real and primal and 
original sense. Is it any wonder, then, that God is inter- 
ested in them, and so solicitous for their welfare ? As every 
worthy parent is anxious that his offspring shall fulfill 
the possibilities of its nature, so the Great Parent — the 



GOD 47 

All-Father — is intent on having His children attain the 
possibilities of their nature, and become perfect, as He is 
perfect. 

Now, the cardinal doctrine of the Universalist denom- 
ination is the Universal Fatherhood of God. It is a 
fundamental idea in our theology. It colors all our 
thought of God and man. It gives us the two other 
distinguishing doctrines of our church, namely, the Uni- 
versa! Brotherhood of Man and the Ultimate Perfection 
of All Souls. We regard God as the Father of all men, 
not of a few men only. Every man is a child of God, 
whether he be a sinner or a saint. The difference between 
a sinner and a saint so far as their relationship to God is 
concerned, is simply this : the sinner is a disobedient child 
of God ; the saint is an obedient one. We use the phrase 
child of God or son of God in no theological and myste- 
rious sense ; nor do we call God our Father in any unique 
or vague manner. He is our Parent, and His attitude 
toward man is comparable to the attitude of the wisest and 
best earthly parent toward his child. We do not, as some 
sects do, look upon God as the governor of man. We 
emphasize the parental relation of God rather than the 
governmental. And you will see, if not in this lecture, 
then in those to come, the significance and consequences 
of this point of view. We do not deny the sovereignty 
of God ; how could we when it is manifest that God and 
God alone is Lord and Ruler of this Universe ? Yet, we 
consider His sovereignty to be something diviner than that 
of a mere governor, however moral and however just. 
His rulership is more like that of Queen Victoria than 
that of the Czar of Russia ; more like that of the noblest 
earthly parent than that of an exacting judiciary. God 
in our conception is a Father and not a Shvlock. He does 



48 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

not demand his rights ; he does not ask his ounce of blood 
and refuse to be satisfied with anything less. -No, no. 
If you read history to any purpose, you see that the Lord 
of this Universe is more lenient than severe with man; 
more merciful than just ; if you read your Bible, and par- 
ticularly the New Testament, to any purpose, you will find 
these same truths emphasized. Jesus did not dwell on 
the sovereignty of God, as did Mahomet ; nor upon the 
justice of God, as did the mediaeval theologians : Jesus 
dwelt on the Fatherhood of God, and the Love and Mercy 
flowing out of that near relation. That was, indeed, the 
one superb fact that Jesus taught the world. "Before 
Christ came, the fatherhood of God formed a part of no 
philosophy and of no religion, except so far as the Hebrews 
thought Jehovah their Father, but filled with enmity and 
hatred to their enemies and the Gentiles in general." Since 
Jesus' time, man has come to believe with more and more 
clearness and gladness his relationship to God and God's 
fatherly attitude toward him. So that the Universalist 
finds a warrant in philosophy and in the scripture for his 
doctrine of the Universal Fatherhood of God. 

Out of this relation there grows one attribute of God 
which our church has always, and for a long time almost 
exclusively, emphasized, namely : the love of God. Our 
creed says : " We believe that there is one God whose 
nature is love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one 
Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole 
family of mankind to holiness and happiness." These words 
announce three things: (1) That God's nature is love ; 
(2) that this love is revealed in Jesus Christ; (3) that 
it will finally draw all men to holiness and happiness. 

That God is love follows ethically from his Father- 
hood. In that God is the father of man, his nature must 



GOD 49 

be love, for the motive which leads a true father to beget 
offspring is Love. The Bible also teaches that God is 
love ; indeed, the central theme of the Scriptures, the 
New Testament especially, is the love and mercy of God. 
God's love is also manifested in the life and death of Jesus 
Christ. 

"In his more than motherly compassion and tenderness; 
in his genial sympathy with the grief-stricken, in his pleading 
love for the sinner, in his open arms for the despised and 
rejected of men, in his works of divine mercy, in his death on 
the cross, Jesus exhibited not only the sincerity and depth of 
his own love, but equally the intensity of God's love for his 
human family ; and none can look upon Christ as the image of 
God, without feeling the fatherly goodness of the Almighty 
more profoundly than our poor human speech, nay, even as its 
words fell from the Saviour's lips, can utter it." 

Our Church has always taught that the love and mercy 
of God are to be considered central and cardinal in Chris- 
tianity rather than the justice of God, and we believe that 
in this we are following right in the footsteps of Jesus, 
and setting the pace for all Christendom. 

An evangelical scholar of great ability has at last declared 
that : " The love of God to the world . . . will shine forever 
as the central sun of the universe, when all the creeds and 
theologies have been buried in the oblivion of the eternities. 
It will go on through the centuries of the world, darting its 
rays of heavenly light, its beams of divine fire, and its regen- 
erating and transforming movements, until the world knows 
that God loves the world, and the world adores him with loving 
worship." l 

It is because of the certainty of God's Fatherhood 
and the constancy and winsomeness of God's love that the 

!Dr. Charles A. Briggs. 



50 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Universalist is optimistic enough to believe that finally 
God will draw all his children to him, and thus win them 
to holiness and happiness. The father will not stand on 
the threshhold and watch and wait in vain ; the last, way- , 
ward child will come to himself, and return to his father's 
arms. 

Just two words in closing. The Universalist says, 
use your reason in religion. You ask, what standard of 
judgment shall I consult ? I suggest these two : The 
Fatherhood of God and the Love of God. Try every 
doctrine and dogma by these two tests. See if it is con- 
sistent with the Fatherhood and with the Love of God. If 
it is, believe it, and use it ; if it is not, disbelieve it and 
reject it. 

The other word is this : the universe is Good. It is 
the work of a wise and loving being, who pronounced it 
in the beginning, very good. Believe Him. It may not 
seem good in every part, but that is the fault of our vision 
and knowledge. Paul is right : "All things are working 
together for good." Bear this thought with you wherever 
you go ; whatever befalls you. No matter in what aspect 
God appears to you remember that he is Love, and that 
you are his child ; that behind all things is a loving heart, 
and in all things a good purpose. If He chastens you, it 
is not for the mere sake of punishment, but that the chas- 
tening may result in righteousness and yield its peaceable 
fruits. If He sends you down lonely paths, weighted with 
burdens, it is that you may come unto the green valleys 
and rest forever beside the still waters. If He leads you 
by tortuous defiles, slowly up the rugged steeps, until your 
feet are torn and bleeding, it is that you may stand at last 
on the summits of perfection and breathe diviner air ! 



LECTURE IV* 

EVOLUTION 

" He that would make real progress in knowledge must dedicate his 
age as well as his youth, the later growths as well as the first fruits, at 
the altar of truth." — Berkeley. 

I used to fear evolution. The name repelled me. It 
brought up images of atheists and infidels. It sounded 
for all the world like "Devil-ution." I always looked 
askance at a man who used the word ; and was positively 
sorry for those who believed the doctrine ; and I do not 
know but what I was bitter toward those who taught it. 
One day, several years ago, there came a great change in 
my attitude toward evolution and evolutionists. In reading 
the Christian Union, an evangelical paper, I came across 
a paragraph which recommended a book entitled " Evolu- 
tion in its Relation to Religious Thought," by Professor 
Le Conte, saying that it was a popular presentation of the 
subject from a Christian standpoint. Up to that time I 
had not dared to think that evolution could be discussed 
by a Christian. I wanted to see what Professor Le Conte 
had to say. I got the book. It was a revelation ! I knew 
that Professor Le Conte was one of the ablest geologists 
of America ; a religious thinker of considerable penetra- 
tion and great honesty ; and a member of the Presby- 
terian church. Hence, when I read from the pen of such 

* Delivered also before the students of Bates College, Lewiston, Me., 
by special request. 



52 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

a man the words I am about to quote, I said I must 
investigate evolution as far as possible. 

Professor Le Conte said : ' ' The reader will perceive that 
we regard the law of evolution as thoroughly established. It is 
not only as certain as — it is far more certain than — the law of 
gravitation. It is only necessary to conceive it clearly to accept 
it unhesitatingly. The consensus of scientific and philosophical 
opinion is already well-nigh, if not wholly, complete. If there 
are still lingering cases of dissent among thinking men, it is 
only because such do not yet .conceive it clearly — they confound 
it with some special form of explanation of evolution which they, 
perhaps justly, think not yet fully established. We have 
sometimes, in the preceding pages, used the words evolutionist 
or derivationist ; they ought not to be used any longer. The 
day is past when evolution might be regarded as a school of 
thought. We might as well talk of gravitationist as of evolu- 
tionist." 

After reading this confident conclusion of this scholar, 
I also came upon these words a little further on in his 
mind-opening book : 

" There can be little doubt in the mind of the thoughtful 
observer that we are even now on the eve of the greatest 
change in traditional views that has taken place since the birth 
of Christianity." This change involves, "not a mere shifting 
of line, but a change of base ; not a readjustment of detail 
only, but a reconstruction of Christian theology." 

Well, I said, if this be true, if this law of evolution 
is to work such a revolution in theology, I must look 
deeply into the matter to see what the changes hinted at 
are likely to be, and especially to note whether they will 
affect the theology of my church as well as the theology 
of the other churches. And from that day to this I have 
given the study of evolution all the time and care that one 
situated as I have been could give it. And I bring 



EVOLUTION 53 

you to-night some of the results of my study, in as popu- 
lar and as intelligible a form as possible. I confess that 
my prejudice against evolution has vanished. The misap- 
prehensions I had have been corrected by my reading, and 
my ignorance has been sufficiently cleared away to enable 
me to see that between the law of evolution and true 
religion there is no more conflict than between the law of 
gravitation and true religion. My object in introducing 
this subject into this course of lectures is many-fold. 
Three chief reasons are these : First, in the interest of 
truth, with the hope that you may personally look into 
this fascinating and really wonderful explanation of origins ; 
secondly, to show the true bearings of evolution upon 
certain vital doctrines of theology ; and, thirdly, to pre- 
pare the way for the lectures that are coming on Man 
and on Salvation. 

Now for an Understanding of Evolution. First 
a definition. Evolve is from the Latin word evolvere, 
e meaning out, and volvere to roll. Evolve, therefore, 
means to roll out. Evolution consequently is the act of 
unrolling or unfolding, as in the process of growth where 
a bud develops into a flower or an egg into an animal. 
Dr. McCosh says that w evolution is the drawing of one 
thing out of another." Evolution among scientists and 
philosophers is the doctrine that the universe has grown or 
developed or evolved from the simplest beginning to its 
present complex state. Professor Le Conte describes the 
process as, "a continuous, progressive change, according 
to certain laws, by means of resident forces." One of the 
best illustrations of evolution is the development of an 
egg. We all know that an egg begins as a microscopic 
germ-cell, then grows into an egg, then organizes into a 
chick, and fin all v grows into a full-grown bird. Those 



54 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

who have watched the incubator process of hatching 
eggs have seen how a part of this unfolding has taken 
place ; how stage after stage the egg has developed until 
the chick burst the shell and stepped out into the world. 
After a series of transformations more or less resembling 
those in the production of a full-grown bird, the universe, 
particularly organic nature, has been produced. Way 
back there in eternity, the original atom, or atoms, began 
to be hatched out ; slowly, through successive stages, the 
universe came into existence. The worlds and all that in 
them is were hatched or evolved from that wonderful 
original world-egg, the atom. 

Concerning this Fact or Evolution it is well for 
us to know that it is not a new discovery. It was known 
to the ancients more than two thousand years ago. The 
Ionian physicists, five hundred years before Christ was 
born, taught evolution. Thales and Anaximander even 
theorized upon the fact and sought to explain it by saying 
that " the world was generated out of primordial matter 
which has, at the same time, a universal supporting force 
by virtue of which it passes into successive forms." 
These old philosophers thus resemble modern evolutionists, 
since they regard the world, with its infinite variety of 
forms, as issuing from a simple mode of matter. A little 
later, Empedocles, four hundred years before Christ, took 
an important step in the direction of modern conceptions of 
physical evolution by teaching that all things arise, not by 
transformations of some primitive form of matter, but by 
various combinations of a number of permanent elements. 
What, then, is the difference between evolution of twenty- 
three centuries ago and evolution of to-day ? This : in 
those days the conclusions were mainly speculative; 
they were reached from the side of reasoning. To-day, 



EA'OLUTIOX 55 

the conclusions are mainly based on knowledge. They 
have been derived from an observation of facts. Hence, 
evolution is established now, whereas it was only held 
tentatively then. 

Now some one may avell ask : If evolution has been 
known to philosophers and theologians for centuries, 
what is all this controversy about that has been especially 
bitter these past thirty-five years? Why have scientists 
been arrayed against scientists ? and theologians against 
scientists and against themselves ? The answer is two- 
fold : On the one hand, there has been a controversy over 
the extension of the law of evolution ; and on the other 
hand, there is a controversy over the explanation of the 
cause of evolution. 

There, really, has never been any quarrel among 
scientists as to the fact of evolution : they have always 
seen and acknowledged the law. The first quarrel arose 
over the extension of this law. Some said, it does not 
operate everywhere; others said it does. And then the 
mud began to fly, and theologians stooped down and 
gathered up handfuls of it and had their flings. Here is 
the way the modern battle began. Cuvier, the French 
naturalist (1739-1832), while he admitted that evolution 
or development was a fact, held that it was a limited fact. 
He could not see nor admit that everything was evolved. 
In looking upon the various species of plants and animals, 
each species seemingly so different in every way from 
every other species, Cuvier said, the individual members 
of various species may have been descended from one 
another, but the species themselves are not descended 
from other species. They must be distinct creations. 
Hence, he laid down the hypothesis that each species was 
created outright by Divine power just as we now find it, 



56 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

at some geologic period of time. This is the doctrine of 
the origin of species by special creation, and it has been 
the common doctrine both of science and religion until 
thirty-five years ago. 

In 1809 and in 1822 there were born in England two 
men who were destined to revolutionize science. Charles 
Darwin was born first, and Alfred Russell Wallace some 
thirteen years afterward. These men began the study of 
natural science independently, but both reached similar 
conclusions as to the extension of the law of evolution. 
On July 1, 1858, two papers were read before the Lin- 
naean Society, of London, which contradicted the theory 
of Cuvier and the special creationists by maintaining that 
evolution was a universal fact ; that it accounted for the 
origin of species as well as the origin of individuals^ 
One of these papers was forwarded from the East Indies 
by Alfred Russell Wallace, and contained the result of his 
observations "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart 
indefinitely from the Original Type. " l The other paper was 
contributed by Charles Darwin. It was entitled, "The 
Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection," and 
contained the results of over twenty years of study. 

The publication of these papers precipitated the great- 
est controversy science has ever known. Scientists who 
followed Cuvier in his theory of the origin of species 
by special creation, arrayed themselves against Wallace 
and Darwin and their followers who declared that what- 
ever the true explanation of the origin of species it 
was certain that they had not been specially created. 

1 Mv. John Fiske says: " It would be incorrect to rate Mr. Wallace's 
merits in the discovery of the law of natural selection, so high as Mr. 
Darwin's. They do not stand on precisely the same level, like Adams 
and Leverrier with reference to the discovery of the planet Neptune." 



i;\ 0L1 TION - r >7 

Theologians were drawn into the battle because <>f the 
unfavorable bearing of the new doctrine upon .some of* 
their dogmas. This is the explanation of tin- first greal 
controversy. Bui ii is about over now, so far as scientists 
are concerned. Thirty-five years of criticism and inves- 
tigation and verification have sufficed to convince an 
overwhelming majority thai Cuvier was wrong in his 
hypothesis. There Is general agreement now amongthem 

as to the certainty that all living Organisms, animal and 

vegetable, have been derived from .some tew original, 

simple forms, possibly from one. Indeed, they leel that 

this vast extension of the law of evolution is so justifiable 

that they say, as Mr. John Fisko says : 

"There is no more reason for supposing thai this conclusion 
will ever be gainsaid than lor supposing thai the Copernican 
astronomy will sometime he overthrown and the concentric 
spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the min^s of men." 

But the theologians — some of them and perhaps most 
Of them — are not eon\ cited lo 1 he ext reme extension of 

the law of evolution; they still believe Cuvier and are 
fiercely, although it must he futilely, contending thai 
evolution does not apply to the origin of species. II" a 
lew theologians admit that species were developed, thej 

make an exception in the case of man, and hold that he 

at least was specially created. Well, they must battle on 

until they see the dense lolly of their Opposition, and then 
they will fall into line with science as lhe\ did years ago 

after vainly fighting againsl the universal extension of the 

principle of gravitation; and thej will learn that the vers 
fact they are now disputing will help rather than hurt the 

cause of true religion. The wider potency given the 
Inn- of evolution does not , as we shall see 9 make against 
any fundamental doctrine of a true religion. 



58 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Now, how have scientists and philosophers and some 
theologians become so convinced that evolution is the true 
and only method by which all living organisms came to be 
what they are? Simply by a study of the facts, and 
reasonings from them I Suppose we turn naturalists and 
philosophers for a few minutes, and see what our study of 
nature will lead us to. We might do many things first, 
but it will be best to try at the outset to classify the living- 
organisms of the earth that we are to make a study of. 
We can do this better than the ancient naturalists because 
they did not know enough of the multitudinous forms of 
life to classify them except on an arbitrary and crude 
basis. As we survey the vast field, 1 we find that it is 
possible to divide all living things into two kingdoms — 
the vegetable and the animal — on the basis of their 
structural and functional differences. In the animal king- 
dom we place the whole class of beings having animal life. 
In the vegetable kingdom we place all kinds of plants. 
Now we may still further divide and sub-divide the vege- 
table kingdom, but for our present purpose, especially to 
save time, we will confine our attention to the animal 
kingdom, and try to group its various members. After 
considerable study we find it possible to break this king- 
dom up into eight sub-kingdoms, each sub-kingdom being 
separated from its neighbor by pronounced differences 
in the structure or make-up of its members. Labeling or 
naming these eight sub-kingdoms, beginning at the earliest 
and lowest and simplest forms of organisms and ascend- 
ing, we have in order (1) the animalcule, (2) the sponge, 

!" There are two million species of plants and animals such as 
naturalists classify." — (Cosmic Philosophy II., 71.) " In the inorganic 
world there are only a few score of elemental substances combined in a 
few hundred molecular forms and associated in perhaps one thousand 
distinct crystalline shapes."— (Interpretation of Nature, 188.) 



EVOLUTION 59 

(3) the jelly-fish, (4) the star-fish, (5) the worm, (6) the 
shell-fish, (7) the crab, spider and insect and (8) the back- 
boned sub-kingdoms. 1 In one of these eight great groups 
we may locate every animal we find, assigning it its place 
according to its anatomical or structural resemblances to 
the proper members of this or that or the other sub-king- 
dom. Still further. We find that each of these eight 
sub-kingdoms may be divided and sub-divided into classes, 
orders, families, genera, species, and sometimes interme- 
diate groupings. For instance, the backboned sub-king- 
dom or vertebrates is divisible into five classes — the fishes, 
the amphibians, the reptiles, the birds, and the mammals ; 
and each of these classes is further divisible into orders or 
families. If we take the mammalian class alone it will 
yield us as many as sixteen orders or families. And these 
orders or families are further divisible into genera ; and 
the genera are separable into species. This procedure 
would give us all the main divisions with which to beoin 
systematic classification, namely : kingdoms, sub-king- 
doms, classes, orders or families, genera and species. 

Now, suppose we had something to classify. Let it 
be a gray squirrel. What would we do with it? We 
would assign it first to the animal kingdom, because it had 
animal life ; to the vertebrate sub-kingdom, because it 
had a skeleton within the body, a brain, and a backbone ; 
to the class mammalia, because its young are nourished 
for a time by milk secreted by the mammary glands of 
the mother ; to the order or family rodentia, because of 
its large incisor teeth in each jaw distinct from the molar 
teeth whereby it gnaws ; to the genus sciurus, the Latin 
name for squirrel, because of its squirrel-like characteris- 

1 Language a little simplified from Macalister's Zoology; Invertebrata, 
p. 14, as given in The Development Theory by Bergen, p. 24. 



60 GOOD SENSE IN EELIGION 

tics ; and to the species gray squirrel, because of its color. 
In like manner we could and would deal with other 
animals coming under our notice until the whole animal 
creation was classified. 

Now, what would we note in our attempt to classify 
the plants and animals of the world? First, we would 
notice that each group, however small, however insignifi- 
cant, was related to every other group, naturally, in a real 
and vital manner. We would see that every animal was 
related to every other animal ; and that every plant was 
related to every other plant. Indeed, we would find that 
there was a point at the very beginning of organic life 
where it was almost impossible to tell the difference 
between plants and animals, so close the likeness or rela- 
tionship. 

Secondly, we would discover that this long and ramified 
series — whether of plants or of animals — had plainly pro- 
ceeded the one from the other, from the very lowest to the 
very highest, from the simplest to the most complex, 
through infinite and marvelous gradations. The members 
of the animalcule sub-kingdom we would find shading off 
into the members of the sponge sub-kingdom ; the sponge 
sub-kingdom into the jelly-fish ; the jelly-fish into the star- 
fish : the star-fish into the worm ; the worm into the 
shell-fish; the shell-fish into the crab, spider and insect; 
and the crab, spider and insect into the backboned sub- 
kinodom. And these transitions from one sub-kingdom 
to the other would be so gradual and so subtle as in many 
places to test our keenest powers of observation to tell 
where the separation began. The members of each lower 
sub-kingdom would be found to have prepared the way for 
the members of the next higher sub-kingdom. And from 
the highest sub-kingdom — that of the vertebrates or back- 



EVOLUTION 61 

boned animals — this process of development would be seen 
to be still going on : the fishes changing into amphibians ; 
the amphibians into reptiles ; the reptiles into birds ; and 
the birds into mammals, each class giving way before the 
next higher class. The mammals, being the highest class, 
would be found developing progressively order after order, 
sixteen of them in all, from the monotremes up to the 
primates. Even here the unfoldings would not stop, for 
the order of primates would be seen developing genera, 
such as the monkeys, apes, and men ; and these, in turn, 
would be found developing varieties of monkeys, apes, and 
men. 

So that if some one should ask us after our study 
to put on the blackboard something to represent the way 
in which organic life had come to its present condition, we 
would draw a huge tree. It would have a short trunk, to 
represent the lowest organisms, which cannot properly be 
termed either plants or animals. This short trunk would 
then soon separate into two large trunks, one of which 
would represent the vegetable and the other the animal 
kino'dom. Each of these trunks would then oive off laro-e 
branches, signifying sub-kingdoms ; and each of these 
would give off smaller but more numerous branches, signi- 
fying classes ; and these would give off still smaller and 
still more numerous branches, signifying families or orders, 
which would ramify a^ain into genera, and finallv into the 
leaves, which might be taken to represent the species. 1 
If some one should ask us what the sap was which vital- 
ized this wonderful living tree, speaking as naturalists we 
should say, heredity ; speaking as theologians we should 
say, God. 

1 Darwin, and After Darwin, p. 29. 



62 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Now, we have not been giving our thought and time 
to an imaginary and impossible classification of the plants 
and animals of the world. This sort of classification which 
we have attempted is in vogue to-day among biologists. 
It is what they call the natural system, as contrasted with 
the ancient arbitrary and artificial system of classifying 
flora and fauna ; it has its basis in the anatomy which 
nature herself has given to her offspring. 

Biologists, whether they be botanists or zoologists, 
simply follow the course that nature has taken in the pro- 
duction of her children, and the result is this wonderful 
geneological tree ; this immense apartment house, with all 
its rooms occupied by relatives. Relationship and subor- 
dination are everywhere unmistakable. And, what is 
the inference : indeed, what is the plain doctrine of" a 
classification like this ? Does it endorse the idea that the 
vegetable and animal kingdoms were created separately 
and at once ; that each sub-kingdom was also suddenly 
made ; that the several classes and orders, genera, families 
and species came into existence each by itself and unre- 
lated to anything that had preceded it? Or, does it 
declare that the two great-kingdoms came up from pre- 
ceding conditions ; the sub-kingdoms from the two great 
kingdoms; the classes, orders, families, genera and 
species from the various sub-kingdoms and from one 
another? Plainly, it teaches the latter doctrine, and 
thus endorses, in a way past denying, the development or 
evolutionary theory of organic life. Indeed, no man 
to-day can attempt a classification of plant and animal 
life without being quickly converted to the evolution theory. 
We are not surprised to read that at the reopening of the 
University of Rome, Professor Moleschott, the German 
physiologist, reminded his assembled scientific brethren 






EVOLUTION 63 

that, "to-day every organized form is fitted in, as an essen- 
tial link in a chain of derivation and descent. Nothing 
is now left of that fancy that saw in the plan of Nature a 
mass of accidental variations, like the caprice of an author 
who published at the same time with his finished works 
all of his rough draughts and printer's proofs." 

At this point let us remember two important things. 
First, that it is not possible for any one to go back to the 
very beginning of organic life. The fact is, says Pro- 
fessor Shaler, we can only "trace living forms from the 
present day downward through the rocks and backward 
through the geologic ages to the plane of the Lower 
Cambrian," a period somewhere about half-way down in 
the history of organic events. It is hardly possible that 
we shall ever get further back than this, for "the dead past 
has not only buried its dead but has quite effaced the 
burial places." Therefore, it is out of the question to 
ask biologists to furnish us evidence of each and every 
step by which life has come to be what it now is. There 
are "links" 'previous to the Lower Cambrian plane that 
cannot be furnished. The other reminder is this, that 
even above the Lower Cambrian plane it is not yet possi- 
ble to fill in all the gaps or supply all the links in the 
chain of being. "There are a great number of lapses, 
each of which has to be bridged with conjecture until the 
students of the earth are able, through discovery of other 
strata, to fill the gaps. A large part of the vast labor 
which is devoted to the interpretation of the rocks is 
directed to this end of supplying the missing links." 
However, these two admissions of naturalists — that they 
can exhibit nothing in the life-line earlier than the Lower 
Cambrian plane, and that there are many missing links 
yet to be supplied to the chain of being since that time — 



64 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

these admissions need not cause us to give up the theory 
of evolution nor even to doubt its universal scope, for, on 
the one hand, we can very readily see that in the long- 
time- — hundreds of thousands of years (not to say mill- 
ions) — since life first appeared on the earth, and from the 
very structure of the earth, it has been possible and even 
inevitable that the earliest forms of life be effaced. And 
as for the links that are missing in the chain of descent 
since the Lower Cambrian plane, we are assured that 
many of them are being steadily found, and that others of 
them must not be expected as there are origins at times 
which may be called abrupt — a new species, or even 
genus, being produced abruptly from some other one % 
hence, there would be no link between the two. Farmers 
will understand how this can be, for they have seen field 
corn now and then bear a red ear — the red ear being a 
"sport" — something sudden, unlooked for. The same 
with animals. The celebrated Ancon or otter sheep was 
a "sport" or "freak" of nature. We could find, of course, 
no links between a " sport " and the species from which it 
"sported" if much time had elapsed between the time of 
its "sporting" and our search for the link. Nevertheless, 
though links are missing and may ever remain missing, 
there are enough found to make evolution certain and to 
justify its title to a universal law. All the links in the 
main chain of being by which we trace the general lines 
of development have been found, as I have intimated and 
as will be seen in my next lecture. The gaps that have 
to be filled in are those that occur in the life history of 
some species, or variety, or genus, or family, or order of 
plants or animals. 

If any one would like to trace the derivation of a 
species of animal now living from a species now extinct^ 






EVOLUTION 65 

he could do so, and do it step by step. The life history 
of our modern horse furnishes a fine chance for any one to 
be convinced that the development theory is true. We 
are able to trace the history of our horse back as far as 
the mammalian age, some three million years ago. We 
may see how, beginning with an animal known as the 
eohippus, which was about the size of a fox, and had three 
toes behind and four serviceable toes in front, with an 
additional fifth palm-one (splint), and perhaps a rudi- 
mentary fifth toe like a dew-claw, our present horse has 
been evolved. Step by step we can trace the process, 
observing the horse, losing its toes one by one, and 
changing in size, and strength, and beauty, stage after 
stage, until it becomes the horse of to-day, with but 
one toe, and with a great, handsome body and a won- 
derful brain. Geology has furnished us all the fossils 
by which this progressive comparison may be made. 
And this is not the only instance of a long life-history 
which has been deciphered from the writing upon her 
rocks. 

If we would like to assure ourselves that one species 
or one genus could be transformed into another species or 
genus, we might do so by visiting Scmankiewitsch, the 
Russian naturalist. He would tell us, and perhaps show 
us, how he had taken a sort of brine-shrimp found in salt- 
water pools and changed its form according to the greater 
or less saltness of the water. By successive dilutions of 
the water, this naturalist succeeded in producing from the 
original shrimp what for all the world appeared to be 
distinct species. Indeed, the two leading forms which he 
obtained had before that time been known as two different 
genera. He thus proved conclusively that variation from 
one species to another is possible, and endorsed the doc- 



6Q GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

trine that the present forms of life are all variations from 
one original form or type. 

Now it is not hard for us to see how scientists and 
philosophers, in view of considerations and facts such as 
we have been attending to, have come to the agreement — 
to quote the words of Professor Shaler of Harvard College, 
addressed to the divinity students in Andover Theological 
Seminary — that : 

"Organic life began with exceedingly simple combinations 
of a structural sort, which were formed in the earlier geologic 
ages, and has advanced by successive stages of evolution from 
its primitive simplicity to its present exceeding complication. 
The advance is exhibited not only in the material body but in 
the intelligence as well." 

And must not we, from what we have learned so far 
and from what we may learn by further study, follow the 
lead of these scholarly and reverent men in those depart- 
ments of knowledge where they are qualified to speak 
with authority? The doctrine of evolution as opposed to 
the doctrine of special creation has evidently come to 
stay ; the spirit of the age is more and more favorable to 
its universal extension ; and I do not see what theologians 
and religious people can do but accept the doctrine and 
modify their dogmas and views accordingly. 

Feeling how futile it is to dispute the law of evolution, 
an increasing number of theologians are joining the scien- 
tists in their acceptance of the law. But this is far from 
affirming that they are saying amen ! to all the things 
which some scientists have said and are saying in explana- 
tion of evolution. The fact of evolution is one thing — 
all may admit it to be a fact ; the factors in evolution are 
quite another thing — there may be radical differences of 
opinion on this matter : and there are. Indeed, the early 






EVOLUTION 67 

controversy over the fact of evolution has been shifted to 
a contention over the factors in evolution. Our scientific 
brethren are in disagreement here. Even Mr. Darwin 
and Mr. Wallace, in perfect agreement as to evolution 
itself and equally sure that natural selection is a chief 
factor in the process, are yet disagreed as to the part that 
natural selection plays in the march of the generations. 

There are two great problems which the universe sets 
before the scientists and philosophers ; indeed, before 
every student. First, what is the explanation of the 
incessant transformations which the world manifests? 
Nothing in organic nature is at a stand-still ; change is 
taking place all the time. Why and how? Secondly, 
there is intelligible order in the world. How may we 
account for the existence of general classes of things, 
including minds, and for universal laws, and finally for 
that appearance of a rational end towards which all things 
tend? These are the problems which the scientists, with 
this wonderful key of evolution in hand, are trying to 
solve. They are very knotty, and it is no wonder that 
there are as many as seven distinct theories advanced 
as true solutions. But neither the scientific nor philo- 
sophic world, to say nothing of the theologic, is satis- 
fied that the problems have been as yet fully solved. 
However, the doubt and discussion, above described, as 
to the factors in evolution, is entirely aside from the 
truth of evolution itself, concerning which, as Professor 
Le Conte and others assure us, "there is no difference of 
opinion among thinkers." Furthermore, it is not a part 
of our duty nor is it sensible for us to refuse to accept the 
law of evolution because some speculation about the law 
is unsatisfactory or repugnant to us. We may grasp 



68 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

the law with both hands and welcome it cordially, and 
leave the earnest men who are at work on the problems of 
the universe to reach an explanation that will really 
explain the phenomena, while we turn our attention to the 
bearing of the fact of evolution on certain theological 
ideas in which we are deeply interested. We must do 
this briefly to-night ; the coming lecture will do it more 
elaborately. 

Professor Le Conte, in the words read at the begin- 
ning of my lectures, declares that evolution is to revolu- 
tionize traditional theological and religious ideas. I believe 
him. 

I can see that the universal extension of this law must 
influence and modify our conceptions of the origin and. 
history of man. It throws a flood of light upon the 
mystery of conscious minds in dependence on physical 
bodies, and upon the dark problems of evil and suffering ; 
and with these matters, I will deal in my next lecture. 

I can also see that the idea of the evolution of the 
universe must alter some of the traditional notions of God 
and Nature. Some have feared that evolution would 
abolish God ; but such a fear is needless. Evolution, as 
we have seen, is simply a name to describe the manner in 
which things have come to be what they are. To say that 
the universe in its development has followed the law of 
evolution is not to say that no one invented that law in 
the beginning and has been using it ever since ; nor is it 
to say that the elements which have been obeying this law 
were not created at the outset. Indeed, evolution pre- 
supposes two things ; it presupposes the existence of some- 
thing to be evolved, and of Some One who has involved 
what is to be evolved. There must be involution before 



EVOLUTION 69 

there can be evolution ! You cannot get something from 
nothing ! Naturalists have not felt that evolution abolished 
the Creator. They have seen that it was futile to try to 
explain the origin of matter or even of life on purely 
physical grounds, and therefore they have not attempted 
it. Professor Clifford, a distinguished and heart-broken 
atheist, said : " Of the beginning of the universe we 
know nothing at all." Mr. Darwin confined his efforts to 
explaining the origin of species. He found matter and 
life existing, and tried to show how the living things round 
about us came to have their present forms. He said that 
his discovery that they had been evolved did not necessa- 
rily overthrow the existence or the providence of God. 
He evidently believed that the original elements had been 
created, for in the last words of his famous book on the 
" Origin of Species " he says : 

'.* There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several 
powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a 
few forms or into one ; and that, while this planet has gone 
circling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple 
a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, 
have been, and are being evolved." 

And we have, in the same strain, these words from 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, the man above all men who 
would account for the universe without a Creator if he 
could : 

" The genesis of an atom is no easier to conceive than that 
of a planet ; indeed far from rendering the universe less 
mysterious than before, it makes much greater mystery of it. 
Creation by fabrication (that is, by special creations), is 
much lower than creation by evolution ; a man can bring a 
machine together but he cannot make a machine that develops 
itself. That our harmonious universe should formerly have 



70 GOOD i. i: in RELIGION 

cxihl<<l pohnliiilly in 1 1 j< State of <lillu<<l matter willionl, form 

:■ n< I thai It should gradually have attained iti present organize 
lion [| much more wonderful than iti formation according to 
the artificial method upposed by the vulgar, would he Those 
wrho considei it legitimate to argue from phenomena i" noumens 
have good right to maintain that i In - nebular hypothesis implies 
;■ primary cause as superior to iii<- mechanical <'<»<! <»l Paley 
as i lull i ioi lie i« 1 1 ii of i he b vagi 

So ili.-ii, whatever ground we may have for believing 
in :i First ( !aus6j or an intelligent E irst ( 'ause, that ground 
in not in the lighte I degree impaired by the doctrine <>r 
evolution! 

Nor does evolution do away with design or purpose in 
the universe. Although Mi. Darwin, by his splendid 
theories of natural and sexual selection} has accounted for 
much of the intelligible order of the world by showing un 
Iiow adaptions have been brought about by purely natural 
<.ni i ■■ , he hai not shown nor claimed to have shown li< > w 
ii i that the creation, as ;• whole, has been moving from 
the very beginning toward definite and lofty goal. We 
have seen how ili<- whole universe Prom the moment the 
ftrst atom <>r if began to unfold, up to the present time, 
has been working unerringly and amazingly toward ili<" 
production :m<l perfecting of man. This fact alone is ;i 
perpetual stumbling blcfck to chance theory <»i things 
and ••' clear corroboration of the doctrine that the universe 
is the product of intelligence. < >n no oilier theory than 
that s Mind conceived an end like this :m<l that ;i Will 
has been bringing this sublime conception (<> pass, <:m we 
account for the progress :il! things have made :i n< I are 
making toward ;• perfected humanity. 

involution , then , does not rob us of our Grod nor wipe 
out the evidences of purpose from the universe* What ii 



EVOLUTION 71 

does do, is this : It gives us a better and grander concep- 
tion of God than we ever had before ! We used to think, 
or at least many Christians thought, and perhaps there are 
some who still think, of God as a master-mechanic who 
had manufactured the universe, section by section, and 
had set it running as soon as every part was properly 
adjusted. He then withdrew from it, and dwelt off there 
in the depths of space, most of the time indifferent to and 
perhaps oblivious of the behavior of the world he had 
manufactured. There came times, however, when he 
revisited his creation, and if anything was found to be out 
of gear, he repaired it ; or if something he had neglected 
to think of in the beginning was seen to be desirable or 
necessary, he furnished it by creative fiat, and then 
withdrew again. That was the old mechanical theory of 
God's relation to the universe. But evolution has done 
away with that idea forever. It forces us to either think 
that God made the universe properly in the beginning so 
that it would come out just as he desired it in the end, and 
then deserted it altogether and has never and will never 
come back to it ; or else that God planned the world just 
as he wished to have it and in his plan has made it obliga- 
tory on himself to be never absent from it ; indeed has 
made the desired development of things to depend on his 
indwelling in his universe. The latter view is the one 
adopted by Christian evolutionists. 

I recall the great words of Mr. John Fiske : "Darwinism 
may convince us that the existence of highly complicated 
organisms is the result of an infinitely diversified aggregate of 
circumstances so minute as severally to seem trivial or acci- 
dental ; yet the consistent believer in God will always occupy 
an impregnable position in maintaining that the entire series, 
in each and every one of its incidents, is an immediate mani- 



72 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

festation of the creative action of God." And of Professor 
Le Conte : 

' ' Evolution has made us return to the old idea of direct 
divine agency, but in a new, more rational, less anthropomor- 
phic form. We see that God is an immanent God, that he is 
a God resident in nature, at all times and in all places directing 
every event and determining every phenomena — a God in whom, 
in the most literal sense, not only we, but all things have their 
being, in whom all things consist, through whom all things 
exist, and without whom there would be and could be nothing. 
The phenomena of nature are naught else than objectified 
modes of divine thought ; the forms of nature naught else than 
different forms of ODe omnipresent divine energy or will ; the 
laws of nature naught else than the regular modes of operation 
of that divine will, invariable because He is unchangeable. 
What is the law of gravitation? Naught else than the mode 
of operation of the divine agency in sustaining the universe — 
the divine method of sustentation. What is evolution? 
Naught else than the mode of operation of the same divine 
energy in originating and developing the universe— the divine 
method of creation." "There is no real efficient force but 
spirit, and no real independent existence but God." 

You remember the story of the atheist and his little 
daughter? He lay upon his bed dying. He had lived 
without faith in God, and his life had been lonely and 
unsatisfactory. He believed in mottoes and had hung 
one in his room just above his bed. It read : " God is 
nowhere." His feverish eyes now fell on that motto, and 
he was saying, Yes, God is nowhere, when his little 
daughter, her young heart full of faith in God and love 
for her father, clambered onto a chair, and with a pencil 
altered the motto so that it read " God is now here ! " 
That is what evolution does for the atheist and for the 
believer as well : it says, God is now here ! It says more : 



EVOLUTION 73 

It says, God is God! He is the High and Holy and 
Mighty One His children think Him to be ! 

As evolution lifts the curtain that has long veiled Him 
from mortal eyes, God emerges to view in the regal form 
of a Being who knew what He was doing when He com- 
menced this universe, and who went about His sublime 
task as an infinitely wise and powerful being would natur- 
ally go. God, no longer, is to be regarded as an exper- 
imenter, who began a world which has been too much for 
Him ! God, no longer, is to be called a blunderer by 
those that hate Him, nor is He to be shorn of some of 
His power by those that love Him and deem it their duty 
to say that He contends with a Devil, in order to explain 
the seeming evil and failures in the world ! Xo, our God, 
my beloved brethren, is no experimenter : His mind was 
great enough to conceive of a creation worthy His infinity, 
and His resources were ample enough to realize His 
conception in every detail ! 

And this universe goes on its way to-day, just as its 
Creator expected ; and we may be sure that it will fulfill 
His intention and justify His wisdom ere the last curtain 
falls and the great drama is finished ! 

Evolution, therefore, is an optimistic theory. It does 
not say, as the special creation theory says : "God is an 
absent God, and this world is a failure." It says : " God 
is a present God. He is in His heavens and in His 
earth and all is well with the world." It taught Tennyson 
to say : 

" One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 
Toward which the whole creation moves." 

It teaches us to reserve harsh criticisms of the Creator 
until creation is completed ; and warrants the Universalist 



74 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

in believing that when the end comes we will see that we 
were wise in trusting, 

" That somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. 

" That not a worm is cloven in vain; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain. 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God has made His pile complete! " 






LECTURE V 

MAN 

Progress is 
The law of life; man's self is not yet Man! 
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth 
While only here and there a star dispels 
The darkness, here and there a towering mind 
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows. — Browning. 

It will be well to recapitulate the trend of the last 
lecture before entering upon our present theme. In that 
lecture, we saw ivhat evolution was — a drawing of one 
thing out of another ; we examined some of the proofs 
in favor of this law ; we saw that the law was evidently 
a universal one ; and we also learned that instead of 
abolishing God and His Providence, evolution brought 
Him into the universe more vitally than He had been sup- 
posed to be in it before, and made Him a provider whose 
loving tendance was never withdrawn from His children. 

It was admitted that there are gaps in many depart- 
ments of the classification of plants and animals, but it 
was shown that these gaps are to be expected ; that they 
are evidently missing parts of connected series ; and that, 
as a matter of fact, they do not invalidate the theory of 
evolution, simply because the evidence without them is 
overwhelming in favor of it. When we consider, that on 
the estimate of Sir William Thompson, one hundred 
million years, and on the estimates of others, three hun- 
dred million years, have elapsed since life first appeared 



76 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

on the earth, we can understand that during so vast a 
period many life-structures have crumbled to dust or been 
destroyed by heat, and are forever lost. We can also see, 
in view of the fact that plants and animals sometimes 
"sport," why it is impossible at times to connect some 
varieties with preceding species. The marvel is, that 
naturalists are able to do as well as they do. It is aston- 
ishing that they have the fossils that they have. How 
amazing it is to trace our modern horse step by step back 
into the mammalian age, three million years ago, and 
locate his ancestor in the little eohippus ! We do well to 
congratulate the untiring geologists and biologists not only 
for tracing pedigrees through fossil forms, but for having 
discovered enough links in the chain of being to make it 
perfectly plain how plants and animals have come to their 
present condition. 

I suppose the most exacting critic ought to be satisfied 
if he could be shown the intermediate steps by which 
one great class or species passed into another great class 
or species. I suppose if it could be shown how a fish 
became a reptile, and how a reptile became a bird, and 
how a bird became a mammal, no one would doubt evolu- 
tion any longer. It would be too plain for them to deny, 
without stultifying themselves. As I promised to show 
some such transformation as this, I will do it now, and 
then we will pass on to the theme of the lecture. 

Evolutionists, like Mr. Darwin, in tracing the develop- 
ment of species, begin with organic life. They do not go 
beyond it ; nor seek to explain the origin of life itself. 
No one has solved the problem of the origin of life on 
purely natural grounds. I do not believe any one ever 
will, on purely natural grounds, for God himself is the 
life-giver. He is the vital force, whether physical or 



MAN 77 

spiritual, that animates this Universe! Darwinians, as I 
say, commence their labors with the beginning of organic 
life. We may, however, go back to the dawn of creation 
before there was anything but nebula. Kant, Herschel, 
Laplace and others, by means of the nebular hypothesis, 

permit ns to take onr stand at the \er\ beginning <»t' 

things, before the mist begins to roll away into planets and 

satellites. On the nebular hypothesis, which is the favorite 
one with scientists and philosophers, We learn that before 
anything else there existed a vast, dilliised, revolving 

misty or cloud-like form of matter. This nebula, gradu- 
ally cooling and contracting, threw off, iii obedience to 

mechanical and physical laws, successive rings Of matter, 

from which, subsequently, by the same laws were produced 

the several planets, satellites and other bodies of the solar 

system. Our earth being thus evolved, began to produce 

Organic life as soon as it was sufficiently cooled. Organic 

life evidently has been derived from inorganic matter. We 
have the connecting link. It is the rhizopod, which is 
not organic and y^i possesses sensation and purpose ; show- 
ing that the inorganic may not only have the semblance of 

life but actually possess it. So that a recent hypothesis, 
that matter is ali\e, seems to have foundation in tact. 
Life having appeared, it soon became Organic. 1 The earliest 

forms of life having organs began to differentiate them- 
selves into two grand kingdoms, the vegetable and the 
animal. These kingdoms appeared at the same time. One 

did not rise out of the other; but both diverged from 
primeval Conditions. The Connecting link between them 

is the protista, or animals having functions of a vegetable 

sort, and plants having functions of an animal sort. The 

protista, which multiplied themselves l>\ subdivision, 
1 Condensed from Powell's "Our Heredity From God." 



78 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

developed into organisms which reproduced themselves by 
means of eggs. The sponge is such an organism. It 
lays eggs, and they are bits of protoplasm like other 
eggs. As soon as hatched, the embryo will attach itself 
to some object, and go on to attain the condition of an 
adult sponge. From such low forms to animals with back- 
bones is a tremendous stride, but Nature took it and 
brought forth the fishes. The lancelet is the connecting 
link between the mollusks and the fishes. Certain fishes 
began to long for land-life, and Nature gratified them by 
developing lungs as well as gills so that they could inhabit 
the earth, as well as the water. These new creatures were 
the amphibians. Our common frog is a representative 
amphibian. The frog, by the way, is a fine example of 
evolution, a splendid connecting link. He comes out of 
the water, exchanges his water structural affinities for 
those needed on land, and hops away croaking evolution ! 
evolution ! First a tadpole and a water dweller : swim- 
ming like a fish ; breathing with gills ; without feet or 
any other adaptations for the land ; presently four legs 
break through his skin ; lungs form within him in addition 
to his gills ; his tail shrinks up and is absorbed into his 
body. He is a tadpole no longer. He is a frog. A stand- 
ing vindication of evolution ! A link between the fishes 
and the amphibians. A link also between the amphibians 
and the reptiles, which next appear. By and by the fishes 
and reptiles wanted to fly, and Nature accommodated 
them by turning their scales into feathers, their gills into 
wings, and extending their backbones for tails. The 
archwoj)teryx, whose fossil remains were found in 1879, 
is the link between the reptiles and the birds. rf The fishes 
and reptiles and birds were egg-layers. After them came 
the milk-givers. Between the egg-lavers and the milk- 



MAN 79 

givers there seems to be an impassable gulf. The distinc- 
tion, however, is only this : all life is from an egg ; but 
some creatures hatch the egg inside themselves ; others by 
heat applied to the egg outside. The general connecting 
link here is the marsupial family — creatures that bring 
forth their young in an immature state. The kangaroos 
and opossums are the main representatives of the marsu- 
pials. These mammals — milk-givers — were followed by 
mammals of all sorts,— the insect eaters, grass eaters, 
fruit eaters, and carnivora. The last of the mammalia 
were the primates — namely the lemurs, apes, and men. 
These last receive a combined heritage from all the above, 
and live equally upon flesh, fruit, and herbs." This has 
been the order of evolution — from the inorganic to the 
organic, — first, in the animal kingdom, came the mollusks 
then the fishes, then the amphibians, then the reptiles, 
then the birds, and lastly the mammals. I have named 
the links which bind each of these classes to the preceding 
class, so that the main chain of descent is so obvious and 
welded together so strongly that no one can break it and 
no one can easily miss its significance. Evolution is the 
theory and the only theory that fits the facts described. 

"One of the greatest pains of human nature," says 
Mr. Bagehot, " is the pain of a new idea." And especially 
is this true of a new idea that affects religious faith. Know- 
ing this, one is not surprised if the idea of evolution, 
including the evolution of man, brings pain to many 
people. Indeed, we should not be mystified if we found 
ourselves shrinking from this idea or suffering under it. 
Our human nature is to blame. But this does not excuse 
us from accepting new ideas if true. It is our duty, as 
cultivated minds living in civilized communities, to make 



80 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

heroic and successful efforts to overcome this hostility of 
our humanity to new ideas which are obviously sound or 
which we may be able to prove sound. 

Our course, it seems to me, is not that of the timid 
and decorous lady who, on hearing an exposition of the 
Darwinian theory that men are descended from apes, said : 
" Let us hope that it is not true, or if it is, let us hush 
it up ! " The " hush it up " disposition is really a traitorous 
one. It would deal treachorously with truth. The course 
I believe in and the spirit I admire is like the course and 
spirit of Sir Charles Lyell, an eminent British geologist. 
He had defended the theory of " special creations " for 
more than thirty years, but when he learned of Mr. 
Darwin's researches and private conclusions, he joined Sir 
Joseph Hooker, a noted botanist, in urging Mr. Darwin 
to publish his discoveries and decisions to the world. And 
then, even at sixty years of age, he gave up the old ideas 
which he had loved and advocated, and became an enthu- 
siastic and mighty champion of evolution. One admires 
that aged or aging man or woman who is still young 
enough mentally to be receptive of new ideas even such 
as must revolutionize her previous habits of thinking. 
They are Christ's own followers who cultivate their minds 
and hearts so as to be able to welcome the Spirit of Truth, 
no matter whence or when it cometh. Certainly, it is only 
by the presence of such receptive souls in the world that 
Truth makes any progress toward her high seat of universal 
and beneficent dominion. 

It is obvious and gratifying that a great change has 
come over Americans in their attitude toward evolution. 
The doctrine is now meeting with a friendly reception 
almost everywhere in our land. Dr. Lyman Abbott steps 



MAX 81 

upon the platform of the Lowell Institute in Boston and 
does an unprecedented and startling thing, — he lectures 
upon the Evolution of Christianity, arguing that Chris- 
tianity, the Bible, theology, the Church, Christian society 
and the soul are each and all products of evolution. His 
lectures are listened to by immense and sympathetic audi- 
ences. He is criticised, of course, but the criticism is not 
half so great nor by any means so harsh as his friends had 
feared and his opponents had hoped and prophesied. 
Professor Henry Drummond, whose little volumes have 
delighted thousands of Christians in all lands, comes to 
America, and from the same platform that Lyman Abbott 
maintained Christianity to be an evolution, argues for the 
Evolution of Man. His lectures are immensely popular. 
Hardly a word of dissent is heard either to his thesis or 
his treatment of it. These are signs ! They show that 
our people are thinking. When they see that scholarly 
and reverent and constructive Christians like Lyman 
Abbott and Henry Drummond accept evolution, even 
enthusiastically, they are inclined to do so too. 

Some one asked The Outlook this question : "Are 
there not scientists who believe in evolution in all things 
but man, and regard him as a special creation of the 
Maker ? " To which that well-informed and candid paper 
replied : " No scientist of high repute tolerates the idea of 
special creation." This being true, as it undeniably is, 
the time must come, sooner or later, when no one will 
tolerate the special creation idea. Wherever science leads 
with the torch of truth, humanity is bound to follow. 
I am glad that people are coming more and more to see, 
as Professor Drummond put it : 

" That as there is but one tenable theory of origin — creation, 
so there is but one tenable theory of progress — evolution. 



82 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Those who reserve here and there a point in their acceptance 
of the doctrine of evolution, for special Divine interposition, 
logically must exclude the Creator from the series. If He 
appeared occasionally, He must have been occasionally absent. 
The question is of an all-God or an occasional God." 

And I apprehend that Christians will not debate a 
vital question like this much longer : they will presently 
adopt the alternative of an all-God, that is, an always 
present God, re-enforcing their faith by the teachings of 
evolution which enable one to say that the continuous, 
progressive developments of the universe are due to an 
indwelling Will and an omnipresent Wisdom. 

There are those who do not yet accept the evolution 
of man even though the scientific world is practically 
unanimous in favor of it. Why do these hesitate or 
refuse to take the step ? Is it that they know something 
about the creation of the universe and of man that the 
scientists have not found out? Or, is it that they prefer 
their errors and prejudices to the truth ? Or, is it that 
they so dread "the pain of a new idea" that they intend 
to hold this idea at arm's length by sheer force of will ? 

There are some, undoubtedly, who hesitate to embrace 
evolution because the Bible seems to teach the other 
theory. The story of the creation of the universe and 
of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis seems opposed to 
the evolution of the universe and of man. Now, we 
must not blink the truth. We must frankly admit that 
the Genesis account of creation is quite different from 
the account given by geology, astronomy, and biology. 
The two accounts are contradictory. They cannot be 
reconciled. 

Prof. Ryle is right in saying that : ' ' No attempt at recon- 
ciling the first chapter of Genesis with the exacting require- 



MAX 83 

ments of modern science lias ever been known to succeed, 
without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced inter- 
pretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to 
have no recourse." 

The situation therefore is this : If the Genesis descrip- 
tion of creation is true, the scientific account is false ; 
and vice versa. Of two contradictories both cannot be 
true. Here is a dilemma, of course, for any one who 
thinks that the Bible speaks infallibly upon every subject 
it deals with, and who, at the same time, sees that the 
facts of science are facts that cannot be denied ; but for 
one who regards the Bible as it ought to be regarded, 
there is no dilemma. We frankly concede that the Bible 
is not infallible. We further admit that it is not a text- 
book on science. It is not a scientific treatise. Its 
object is to teach religion and morality. If we want to 
know what pure religion and the loftiest morality are we 
go to the Bible. If we w^ant to know about the constitu- 
tion of the earth, the laws of the universe, and the laws 
of the mind we should go to text-books on geology and 
biology and psychology. Of course, the Bible may 
furnish information that is scientifically true ; but, on the 
other hand, it may not. It may lead us astray scientifi- 
cally. For example: The Psalmist says, "The world 
is established that it cannot be moved" (or Ps. civ., 5). 
This may be taken as a literal truth. It may be held 
to contradict the declaration of. astronomy that the world 
is not stationary ; that it moves all the time. Indeed, 
the church in Galileo's day did this very thing. It held 
that the Bible, in saying that the world is established that 
it cannot be moved, told a revealed fact ; and Galileo was 
made to take back his doctrine, based on the plain teach- 
ings of astronomy, that the world moves. But you and 



84 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION 

I to-day are on Galileo's side and the side of astronomy 
in this matter. We hold that the Psalmist was either 
speaking metaphorically or else he was quite ignorant of 
the behavior of the world. Why do we take this view? 
Simply because we cannot doubt the facts that astronomy 
furnishes ; while we do reverently doubt the claim that 
the Bible speaks infallibly on scientific questions as well 
as on religious and moral ones. Now, in the story of 
creation as told by the writer of Genesis and that story 
as told by geology and biology, we have a case somewhat 
parallel with the fixity of the earth as declared by the 
Psalmist and its mobility as certified to by astronomy. 
As in the past respecting the conduct T of the universe, so 
in the present with respect to its formation, the Church is 
holding to the Biblical statement and refusing the facts of 
science. That such a course is as unwise and as useless 
as the course of the Church in the middle ages is very 
clear when we bear in mind that the Bible is not a scien- 
tific treatise, and examine carefully the story of creation 
as told in Genesis; The legitimate question concerning 
the Genesis story is this : " How did the writer get his 
information? Was it revealed to him by God?" He 
does not say that it was. He makes no claim to be 
inditing a revelation. Did he reach his conclusions 
unaided? No. We have data to-day for saying that the 
writer of the Biblical accounts of creation (for there are 
two accounts), of paradise, the first sin and the deluge, — 
in short, the first eleven chapters of Genesis — got his 
information from traditions handed down to him from 
the Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The excava- 
tions that have been going on at Nineveh have brought to 
light clay tablets which contain accounts of creation, 
paradise, the first sin and the deluge so similar in essence 



MAN 85 

and, in many places, so like the language of the stories 
in Genesis that there can be no longer any doubt that 
they furnished the groundwork of the Genesis accounts. 
If some one says the stories on the clay tablets were copied 
from Genesis or derived from the Hebrews, it is sufficient 
to answer no, because said traditions were current among 
the Assyrians and Babylonians long before Abraham was 
born or the Hebrew race was formed. I wish I had 
time to quote liberally from the Assyro-Babylonian tradi- 
tions, but I must content myself by referring you to an 
article on " The Bible and the Assyrian Monuments " which 
appears in the January, 1894, Century Magazine. That 
article substantiates all I have said, and shows the reader 
where the author of Genesis got much of his information 
from. In view of the knowledge that scholars now have, 
they are admitting that the Genesis accounts of creation, 
of paradise, of the temptation and the first sin of man are 
not historical but legendary. They are saying, as Lyman 
Abbott said concerning the temptation of Eve and Adam : 

" If we met with such stories anywhere else than in the 
Bible, we would unhesitatingly consider them imaginary." 
Dr. Abbott sees no reason why we should not regard the story 
of the temptation as imaginary. He and other critics take the 
same view of the accounts of creation as they do of the para- 
dise story. "They are child-like attempts to explain the 
beginnings of things. We may take them poetically, but we 
must not take them literally." 

In that the Genesis story of creation is to be taken as 
mythical, there is no longer any scriptural stumbling-block 
in the way of one who is solicited by the numerous facts 
of science to embrace evolution as the true explanation of 
the method in creation. If some one ask whether the 
Bible anywhere implies that man may have been evolved, 



86 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

I would answer, yes. The Psalmist, in speaking of his 
own origin, says : " I am fearfully and wonderfully made : 
my frame was not hidden from Thee when I was made in 
secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the 
earth. Thine eyes did see mine imperfect substance, and 
in Thy book were all my members written, which day by 
day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." 
That is language that an evolutionist might use to-day in 
speaking of his origin. 

Those who clearly see that the Genesis story of creation 
is legendary may yet hesitate to believe in the evolution of 
man because there seems to be so great a gulf between 
man and the primates from which he is said to be 
descended. It is sometimes asked : " Is it possible that 
man with his great intellect, his fine aesthetic tastes, and 
his lofty moral sense, has come from such a source?" 
But the fact is, when any one asks such a question, he is 
thinking, not of the average man nor of the savage nor of 
the primitive man, but of the highly civilized man. He 
has in mind a Phillips Brooks or a Gladstone. But such 
a comparison is evidently an unfair and unsafe one. We 
must compare the men that are lowest down in the scale 
of humanity with the animals that are highest up in the 
animal realm in order to reach just conclusions as to their 
resemblances. 

Mr. John Fiske wisely reminds us that, "When we 
take the refined and intellectual Teuton, with his 114 cubic 
inches of brain, and set him alongside of the chimpanzee with 
his 35 cubic inches of brain, the difference seems so enormous 
as to be incompatible with any original kinship. But when 
we interpose the Australian, whose brain, measuring 70 cubic 
inches, comes considerably nearer to that of the chimpanzee 
than to that of the Teuton, the case is entirely altered, and we 



MAX 87 

are no longer inclined to admit sweeping statements about the 
immeasurable superiority of man, which we may still admit, 
provided they are restricted to civilized man." 

Now a comparison of the physical and mental char- 
acteristics of the earliest and lowest men with those of 
the latest and highest animals makes it very clear that 
they are related. There is a class of apes which are 
called anthropoid because they resemble man in so many 
respects. The chimpanzee approaches more nearly to 
man than any other ape. It is not argued, however, that 
man has descended from the chimpanzee or any other ape. 
So that he who asks a naturalist to furnish him the link 
which binds man to his ape ancestor or to explain why 
apes do not evolve into man, asks a foolish question. 
What the naturalist does argue is this : that man and the 
anthropoid apes have sprung from a common source. 
He and the apes are members of the same family. 

Mr. John Fiske says : " Zoologically speaking, man can no 
longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself. We cannot 
erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to 
do ; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is 
not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he 
belongs to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, 
leopards, and lynxes — different genera of the cat-family — are 
descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which 
we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyenas, bears, and 
seals ; so the various genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine 
apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common 
stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the con- 
verging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs until their ancestry 
becomes indistinguishable from that of the rabbits and squirrels. 
Such is the conclusion to which the scientific world has come 
within a quarter of a century from the publication of Mr. 
Darwin's ' Origin of Species,' and there is no reason for sup- 
posing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid." 



88 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Now, if it be true that men and the anthropoid apes 
are descendants of a common ancestor and in many, 
respects have had a similar history in their earliest days, 
we should find resemblances between them. Indeed, on 
the theory of evolution, man will show both in his bodily 
and mental make-up likenesses to the animals that have 
preceded him and particularly to his nearest animal kin 
now living. 

Does man exhibit such marks of his remote ancestry? 

( 1 . ) Take man in his embryonic condition , and embry- 
ologists assure us that in certain stages of birth he cannot 
be distinguished from the embryo of other animals. 

" Even under the highest magnifying power of the best 
microscope," says Haeckel, "there appears to be no 
essential difference between the eggs of man, of the ape, 
of the dog, etc." Looking at the embryo of the calf, the 
rabbit, and man in two distinct stages of development, 
it is impossible to say which is to become a calf, which 
is to become a rabbit, and which is to become a man. 
(2.) Embryology not only makes us see the likeness 
between the human embryo and other embryo, but infancy 
brings out the resemblances in a striking manner. Take 
a new-born babe and observe what a grip it has. Its tiny 
hands have a grasping power far beyond its experience or 
its needs. I have seen a photograph of an infant, three 
weeks old, supporting its own weight for over two minutes 
by grasping a horizontal bar. Whence this grasping 
power at so early an age? Dr. Robinson assures us that 
it refers us to our quadrumanous ancestry — the young of 
anthropoid apes being endowed with similar powers of 
grasping, in order to hold on to the hair of the mother 
when she is using her arms for the purpose of locomotion. 
(3.) Look some time at the lower extremities of a young 



MAN 89 

child. The feet have a strong deflection inwards, so that 
the soles in considerable measure face one another. Then 
look some time at the feet of a gorilla or orang-outang and 
you will see that they are similarly curved inwards, to 
facilitate the grasping of branches. (4.) Not only do 
human infants resemble the anthropoid apes in these ways, 
but infant anthropoid apes resemble human infants in cer- 
tain habits. " The baby orang-outang does not begin to 
walk until it is one month old, and then it learns this art 
by holding on to convenient objects of support, like a 
human infant. Up to this time it lies on its back, tossing 
about and examining its hands and feet." 

Turning from the infant and looking at the adult man 
we discover many vestiges of a simian ancestry. The 
power to move the ears and the skin of the forehead and 
scalp is a survival of that power which was once useful to 
our ancestors in shaking flies off the skin. All people 
cannot work their ears or scalp, thus showing that the old 
power is dying away for lack of use. Professor Drum- 
mond mentions among other survivals of our simian con- 
dition, "the nicitating membrane of the eye, for sweeping 
that member clean ; and the rudimentary hair on the arm 
connected, in its direction, with the arboreal habits of the 
anthropoid apes. The hair on the lower and upper arm 
is directed toward the elbow, a peculiarity which occurs 
nowhere else in the animal kingdom, with the exception 
of the anthropoid apes and a few American monkeys." 
He also calls attention to that significant and dangerous 
organ, the vermiform appendage of the caecum, popularly 
called the "little sac," into which grape or apple seeds 
lodging produce inflammation and death. This little sac 
was of great importance to our herbivorous ancestors, but 
it is of great danger to us with our habits of diet. The 



90 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

absence of a tail in man is popularly supposed to consti- 
tute a difficulty against the doctrine of his quadrumanous 
descent. As a matter of fact, however, the absence of an 
external tail in man is precisely what this doctrine would 
expect, seeing that the nearest allies of man in the quadru- 
manous species are likewise destitute of an external tail. 
Anthropoid apes have no tails. And yet, it is true that 
man at a certain time* before his birth, has a tail and 
muscles for moving it. There are survivals of this tail in 
adults, and in some instances the rudimentary muscles for 
wagging it are found. 

Turning from this testimony, from embryology and 
morphology, as to man's origin, I want to call attention to 
a striking anatomical fact pointed out by Dr. Clevenger, 
that man is only imperfectly adapted to the erect position : 

"Very many of the veins are provided with little interior 
folds or pockets which allow the blood to flow with ease in 
one direction but not in the other. Usually these serve a 
valuable purpose in preventing the blood from being driven 
away from the heart by the action upon the veins of the 
contracting muscles about them during active movements 
of the trunk or limbs, and in relieving the veins from the 
pressure of the long liquid columns that would, without the 
valves, bear severely on the lower portions of the longer 
vertical veins. But it is a singular fact that these very main 
trunks which traverse the body longitudinally are for the 
most part destitute of valves, while the horizontal veins, in 
which the valves would be of the least use, are often provided 
with them, and the jugular vein, or great vein of the neck, 
actually has its valves so arranged as to hinder the flow of 
blood to the heart." 

These curious facts Dr. Clevenger attributes to the 
origin of the race from ancestors whose normal position 
was horizontal or, at most, semi-erect. Restore the man 



MAX 91 

of to-day to this ancestral posture and all these anomalous 
arrangements in the venous circulatory system will work 
smoothly, as we may suppose them to have done of old. 
So, too, the tendency to displacement of several important 
organs will be done away with. 

I will leave the evidence for man's physical descent 
from an animal ancestor, by quoting from Professor Henry 
Drummond, who says : 

" Take away the theory that man has evolved from a lower 
animal condition, and there is no explanation whatever of any 
one of these phenomena. With such facts before us, it is 
mocking human intelligence to assure us that man has not 
some connection with the rest of animal creation. That 
Providence, in making a new being, should deliberately have 
inserted these eccentricities, without having any real connection 
with the things they so well imitate, or any organic relation to 
the rest of his body, is, at least with our present knowledge, 
simple irreverance." 

Now, while evolution explains the origin of man's 
body, it has not accounted for the origin of his soul or 
mind — the two words mean the same thing. Some one 
asks : On the evolution theory where does the soul come 
in? The answer is: We do not know. That question 
is still a mooted question. The church has never settled it. 
Science has not settled it. Mr. John Fiske says : 

"Whence came the soul we no more know than we know 
whence came the universe. The primal origin of conscious- 
ness is hidden in the depths of the by-gone eternity. That it 
cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of 
material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by 
what we now know of the correlation of physical forces. The 
Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual substance, an effluence 
from Godhood, which under certain conditions becomes incar- 



92 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

nated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view 
most consonant with the present state of our knowledge." 

Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul; 
Evolution has taught us something with regard to the 
conditions under which it has become incarnated in mate- 
rial forms, and something very helpful as to the source of 
many of the traits of the soul. Evolution makes it cer- 
tain that many of our mental and emotional characteristics 
are derived from our animal ancestors. We have time 
merely to trace the origin of our emotions. Mr. Romanes 
has shown that the sense of fear — the earliest emotion — 
is manifested by the annelids — creatures very far down in 
the scale of life ; to the insects — somewhat higher up — we 
owe our social feelings, as well as our industry, pugnacity, 
and curiosity. Jealousy seems to have been born into the 
world with fishes ; sympathy, with birds. The carnivora 
are responsible for cruelty, hate, and grief; the anthropoid 
apes for remorse, shame, the sense of the ludicrous, and 
deceit. 

Professor Drummond observes that "there are almost no 
emotions in the child which are not here — this list, in short, 
practically exhausts the list of human emotions. With the 
exception of the religious feelings; the moral sense, and the 
perception of the sublime, there is nothing found, even in adult 
man, which is not represented with more or less vividness in 
the animal kingdom. But this is not all. These emotions 
appear in the mind of the growing child in the same order as 
they appear on the animal scale. At three weeks, for instance, 
fear is perceptibly manifested in a little child. When it is seven 
weeks old the social affections dawn. At twelve weeks emerges 
jealousy with its companion, anger. Sympathy appears after 
five months ; pride, resentment, love of ornament after eight ; 
shame, remorse, and sense of the ludicrous after fifteen months. 
It is a circumstance to which too much significance cannot be 



MAX 93 

attached, that the tree of mind as we know it in lower nature, 
and the tree of mind as we know it in a little child, should be 
the same tree, starting its roots at the same place, and though 
by no means ending its branches at the same level, at least 
growing them so far in a parallel direction." 

But I have not time to go further into the evidences 
that man, physically and mentally and morally, has been 
evolved. It seems to me that the facts submitted to-night 
are conclusive. If I should add to them, as I easily might, 
the evidence would be simply overwhelming. It must be 
plain now to every reader why the whole scientific world 
and such theologians as Lyman Abbott and Professor 
Drummond among many others believe in the evolution 
of man, as well as the evolution of the universe. 

Now my object in the last lecture and in this one has 
not been to demonstrate evolution to be a universal law 
merely for the sake of such demonstration. My purpose 
has been a theological and not a scientific one. My func- 
tion is to use science for theological and religious and 
moral ends. And because I am so profoundly sure that 
evolution has a tremendous bearing on theoloow and life 
I have taken all this care and all this responsibility to 
show how well established the doctrine is. 

Evolution calls for a theology based on the facts of 
the formation of the universe , and of man as they are 
known to-day ; not as they were held thirty years ago . 
Consequently, evolution bears heavily and fatally upon 
the current theology of Christendom. The whole anm- 
ment of the evangelical theology rests upon one premise, 
namely, the Fall of the Race in Adam. 1 Lyman Abbott 
says that the commonly accepted theory in the evangelical 

1 See lecture on Salvation. 



94 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

churches is as follows : " An original state of perfection ; a 
fall by a representative of the race ; a consequent universal 
condition of sinfulness ; and a restoration to that state 
from which the race fell." Now it is plain as day that the 
doctrine of evolution is inconsistent with the doctrine of 
the fall and of redemption, as thus stated. Lyman 
Abbott affirms as much. He says : "It is utterly impos- 
sible to reconcile the two." Evolution teaches that ? 'all 
life begins at a lower stage and issues through a gradual 
development into a higher ; the theology just described 
affirms that man was made at the highest stage and fell to 
the lower ; evolution declares that life is a continuous 
and progressive change ; this theology, that spiritual life 
always begins in an instantaneous transformation ; evolu- 
tion, that each stage in the process of life is a step into a 
new life never before possessed ; this theology, that the 
end of all spiritual progress is a return to a life once 
possessed, now lost." Of course, evolution and the 
"evangelical" theology are irreconcilable. More than ten 
years ago, Henry Ward Beecher, who accepted the princi- 
ples of evolution and clearly foresaw the impending crisis, 
wrote : 

"To admit the truth of evolution is to yield up the reign- 
ing theology. It is to change the whole notion of man's 
origin and nature, the problem of human life, the philosophy 
of morality, the structure of moral government as taught in 
the dominant theologies of the Christian world, the fall of 
man in Adam, the theory of sin, and the method of atoning 
for it. . . . The doctrine of the fall of man in Adam is not 
an extreme or antiquated notion. It is the working theory 
of the Christian theology as much to-day as it was five hun- 
dred years ago. It is fundamental to the whole orthodox 
theology of the world. That system cannot stand a moment 
if it be exploded." 



MAN 95 

Well, clear friends, evolution as we have learned and 
as we cannot doubt, is a universal law and is accepted as 
such. The theory of the fall of man is therefore 
exploded, and the theory of the rise of man established in 
its place. What say you must happen to a theology 
based upon an exploded idea? Must it not fall too? 
I believe that it must. And I believe that the utter 
collapse of the orthodox theology is now but a question 
of time. 

Another theology is needed to take its place. The 
times demand a theology whose doctrines of God and 
Providence are framed in accord with the manifest way in 
which the universe has been developed and is governed ; 
a theology which postulates doctrines of man in keeping 
with the knowledge that he began low down and has been 
rising ever since ; a theology which, therefore, sees that 
the salvation of man is deliverance from his animalism as 
well as his personal unrighteousness and directs its efforts 
accordingly ; a theology that regards this life as educa- 
tional instead of probational, and holds the future to be 
a continuation of the present, and sees man at the end of 
the ages, not what he was at the beginning, but perfect as 
his Father in heaven is perfect. Such is the theology 
required by evolution and by all the knowledge of these 
closing years of the Nineteenth Century. Is there such a 
theology in vogue? Yes. The Universalist church has 
such a theology. Its system of doctrines is entirely in 
harmony with the teachings of evolution, and, as it seems 
to me, eminently congenial to minds that think and hearts 
that love and hope. 

It is therefore not to be wondered at if the Univer- 
salist is delighted and encouraged to find the discoveries of 
science endorsing the theology that he has been advocating 



96 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

for years against an unrelenting and even a persecuting 
orthodoxy. We may be pardoned for hailing evolution 
and its legitimate conclusions with gestures of joy. We 
are now surer than ever that our cause is a winning cause. 
We may say confidently that the day is near when the 
essentials in our theology will be the essentials in the 
theology of Christendom. 

Do you ask what our theology is that we claim to be 
in thorough accord with science and reason, as well as in 
keeping with the truest interpretation of the Bible? Our 
positions are briefly as follows : We hold that God is wise 
and loving, and that his universe is working unswervingly 
toward a predestined good end. We say that man was 
originally imperfect, with animal instincts and passions ; 
innocent but capable of virtue; ignorant, but capable of 
wisdom ; human, but capable of divinity. We say that 
salvation is not rescue from a personal Devil or from 
perdition, but education and growth in righteousness. 
We teach that under God's fatherly tendance this develop- 
ment in righteousness has been going; on even from the 
beginning and that man has been gradually rising from 
his primitive lowliness, and will eventually become the 
perfect being his Creator intended. 

Evolution supports every one of these positions. In 
our last lecture we saw that the universe is unfolding 
most wisely and most beautifully and is growing steadily 
toward a discernable perfection. In a coming lecture we 
will see that this process of salvation has been going on 
from the first inception of life even until now. In our 
present lecture we have noted man's animal origin, and 
have seen where many of his worst traits came from, and 
in our lecture on God we saw whither man was tending. 

It must now be obvious that there is no need of a 



MAN 97 

Personal Devil to explain the so-called evil phenomena of 
the world. Evolution shows us that what we call physical 
evils are expected occurrences in a finite universe which is 
as yet unfinished — it shows us that they are really not 
evils when looked at from all points of view. It endorses 
the faith that ''partial evil is universal good." Evolution 
accounts also for human traits that, are ugly and destructive, 
not by saying that they are the planting of a personal 
devil, but by showing that they are part and parcel of 
man's animal heritage. Jealousy comes from the fishes ; 
cruelty and hate from the carnivora like the tiger, wolf, and 
bear ; and deceit from the apes. As for moral evil, called 
sin, evolution is silent except where it accounts for inherited 
tendencies to sin. Evolution does not account for sin, 
simply because sin is not an inheritance. It is a personal 
matter whenever committed. True, we may have inherited 
sinful tendencies, but a sinful tendency does not make us 
sinful by nature ; and certainly not guilty. "A tendency 
to sin is not sin, any more than a tendency to insanity is 
insanity." We sin only when we permit the tendency to 
become an actuality. If there had been an Adam and he 
had sinned, it would not have made you and I guilty one 
whit ! Whence then is the origin of sin on the Universa- 
list theory ? Not in a personal spirit of evil that tempts 
and seduces man. Science finds no Personal Devil and 
there is no need of him to account for temptation, and so on. 
The origin of sin, on our theory, is right here in the will 
of each man. Given certain divine and wholesome laws 
to be obeyed ; possessed with a knowledge of these laws 
and with the ability to obey or disobey them, each indi- 
vidual is guilty of sin before his God and his own conscience 
whenever he deliberately disobeys these laws. Each man, 
therefore, is his own personal devil when he transgresses 



98 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

thus, and he should be man enough to lay the blame on 
himself and not shift it upon a mythical Adam or a myth- 
ical Satan ! 

In Conclusion : The word of Universalism to humanity, 
in view of the teachings of evolution and human history, 
is first a word of congratulation. We have no words of 
condemnation for this brave race of ours, although we must 
at times rebuke the wickedness of some of its traitorous 
members. We do not stand in this world and cry out 
to an aspiring humanity: "Woe, woe, you miserable 
sinners ; you outcasts from God ; you heirs of perdition." 
We do not look into the face of this hopeful race of ours 
and survey its magnificent attempts to realize its possibili- 
ties and then behold it brooded over by a malignant spirit 
gloating as he dashes its hopes and dreams and achieve- 
ments to pieces. We do not gather into our vision, through 
the lens of evolution, the rest of animate creation, and 
witness each class and species fulfilling its destiny ; acquit- 
ting itself worthily, and then turn to man, the highest and 
most favored creature of them all, and see him deliberately 
defeatino- his own destiny and mocking his Creator and 
thwarting the ends of Creation. No, no. Our view is 
truer and better and larger than that. Our eve ranges 

o JO 

along the ages and sweeps in man — man as he first 
appeared on the stage of existence, weighted with animal 
tendencies, with but a glimmering of intelligence and with 
the faintest whisperings of duty and destiny hastening 
through the chambers of his soul. We behold this man 
and his offspring at length looking up, searching the firma- 
ment above and the earth and water below for clearer light 
on duty and destiny — their hearts going out with insatiable 
and unique longings to worship and serve somebody. We 
witness the heroic struggles of this crowing- race to free 



MAN 99 

itself of the beast and stand erect with the spirit of God 
and none other within its heart and His image upon its 
countenance. And, thank God ! we see it succeeding. 
"We confess that it has its lowest members as well as its 
highest to-day, but what a distance even its lowest members 
have gotten from animalism ! What a magnificent struggle 
the race as a Race has made ! What a distance it has 
come toward the glory of God ! In the beginning a 
creature half-animal and half-human ; now a being half- 
human and half-God ! In the beginning to be spoken of 
as a bundle of promises ; now to be regarded as a series 
of fulfillments ! Verily, we may congratulate our race on 
this record. We may reach forth and grasp its hand and 
say : Thou human race, it cost all the foregoing ages to 
form thee ; it will take eternity to ripen thee ; but thou 
hast proven worthy the cost ; thou art worthy the career 
that awaits thee ! Thy past is lustrous ; thy future shall 
be brilliant. 

To its word of congratulation, Universalism adds a 
word of encouragement to humanity. Concerning duty, 
we say to man : Study yourself. Study your fellow-men. 
See what you are made of. See what you are able to be. 
Note what you strive against. 'Tis not an external evil 
spirit as powerful as God. 'Tis not a personal spirit of 
any kind. 'Tis the beast within you and the beast in 
other men, — the tiger, the hyena, the bear, the ape. Fight 
that beast. Do not waste your strength on an imaginary 
adversary, but bear down upon the baser animal traits 
within you with the whole power of your manhood and 
womanhood. Let the divinity within you wrestle with 
your carnality until it throws it forever. Yes, 

" Move thou upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 



100 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Take courage in your conflict. Be of good cheer. 
Have great hope. It is not an unequal conflict for you 
any longer. God is with you. Evolution is with you. 
The whole universe is with you. "The supreme message 
of science to this age is that all nature is on the side of 
the man who tries to rise." "Evolution, development, 
progress are not only on Nature's program, these are her 
program. For all things are rising, all worlds, all planets, 
all stars and suns. An ascending energy is in the universe, 
and the whole moves on with one mighty idea and antici- 
pation " : the idea and anticipation of a perfected humanity ! 

" O rich and various Man : thou palace of sight and 
sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night 
and the unfathomable galaxy ; in thy brain, the geometry: 
of the City of God ; in thy heart, the bower of love and 
the realms of right and wrong" ! go forward and lay 
square by square, that City of God, and fill it with 
loving hearts who, knowing good and evil, choose only 
the good and delight in it. Go forward, arm in arm 
with the higher evolution, that a Spiritual Race may yet 
stand in the presence of its Spiritual God and justify His 
wisdom and power in its perfection and praise His name 
forevermore ! 



LECTUKE VI 

JESUS CHRIST 

" Who do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? . . . But who say ye 
that I am?" — Jesus of Nazareth. 

The Sphinx of the Christian religion, its enigma, its 
unsolved riddle, is the personality of Jesus Christ. The 
question, " Who was Jesus Christ ? " has been raised and 
discussed these eighteen centuries, and no unanimous 
decision has yet been reached. The discussion has nar- 
rowed itself down to three different views of him. One, 
that he was absolutely God ; the other, that he was abso- 
lutely man ; and the third, that he was neither God nor 
man but a being midway between the two. The first is 
the Trinitarian doctrine of the Deity of Jesus ; the 
second is the Unitarian doctrine of the humanity of Jesus ; 
and the third is the Arian doctrine of the pre-existence of 
Jesus. 

Universalists and Jesus. In the Universalist 
denomination all three of these views are current. We 
are not united on any one doctrine of the person of 
Jesus. Our creed is such that our preachers and people 
may be Trinitarians or Unitarians or Arians according to 
the view of God and Jesus which most satisfies their 
intelligence and devotional spirit. Hence, we have one 
clergyman and a few people who believe in the Deity of 
Jesus as defined by Trinitarians ; we have others, who do 
not believe that Jesus was God but believe that he pre- 
existed with God : and we have others who neither believe 



102 GOOD SENSE EST RELIGION 

that Jesus was God, nor a pre-existent being, but believe 
that he was a man, like other men, so far as his birth and 
nature were concerned. The attitude of our denomination 
on this mooted and most difficult question has been one 
of concession and toleration. Some one wrote to Dr. 
Emerson, the editor-in-chief of the Christian Leader, 
doubtless our most conservative denominational paper, and 
asked him what a census of the Universalist church would 
probably reveal as to the position of our clergymen and 
laity upon the origin and nature of Jesus. Dr. Emerson 
replied to this eifect : 

' ' We do not know what a Universalist census would reveal 
in regard to the subject of the person of Jesus. We only know 
that very great latitude of belief is not only tolerated, — of 
course tolerated, — but that it evokes no strong feeling of either 
dissent or assent. In regard thereto we succeed easily, where 
success is often difficult, in "agreeing to disagree." 

And yet I think it would be safe to say that the tend- 
ency of our denomination is more and more toward the 
humanitarian view of Jesus, — a view, be it noted, which 
does not necessarily deny the divinity of Jesus although 
it stoutly denies that he was the very and eternal Grod, 
and therefore is opposed to the Trinitarian doctrine of the 
Deity of Jesus. 

In view of this wide latitude of belief concerning the 
person of Jesus which is allowed in our communion, there 
is room with us for those who no longer believe in endless 
punishment and yet hold one of the three views of Jesus 
described. And there is also liberty allowed a Universalist, 
whether in the pulpit or in the pew, to determine for 
himself and to help others determine what the truest doc- 
trine of Jesus is. 

I am not one to leave a riddle unsolved if it appears 



JESUS CHRIST 103 

to be solvable. I do not believe in creating any more 
religions sphinxes than are absolutely necessary. And I 
do love to see some of the old enigmas deciphered and set 
aside in the interest of advancing thought and truer life. 
Therefore, I want to make a careful and frank attempt to 
clear up the mystery about the person of Jesus, if possible. 
I believe that if we can determine who Jesus really and 
truly was, such knowledge will have a practical and whole- 
some effect on our religious thought and conduct. 

I. 

How to Learn Who Jesus Was. — I have no doubt 
if the problem were presented to us to determine who 
Buddha or Mohammed or Confucius or any other great 
religious teacher and leader was, we would go immediately 
to the records of his life. We would not stop to con- 
sider what other men had said of him in credal or sermonic 
form, but we would take up his autobiography or biogra- 
phy and try to reach a clear conviction from its contents. 
We would say, "give me whatever words you have that 
were surely or probably spoken by this teacher and leader, 
and point out to me such deeds as he really or probably 
did, and I will draw my own conclusions as to who he 
was." As we would do in trying to learn who any other 
great religious person was, so we should do in endeavoring 
to decide the origin and nature of our Brother and Leader, 
Jesus Christ. Does it not seem to you that the best way 
for us to learn who Jesus really was is to go at once to the 
records of his words and career and see what he thought 
of himself? We may then pass by the Athanasian and 
Nicene and other creeds, with their theological and philo- 
sophical subtleties, and take up the three Synoptic gospels — 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke — which give a tolerably full 



104 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and faithful account of Jesus. If we consult the Fourth 
Gospel, we must be careful ; because it is acknowledged 
to be and clearly is a philosophical interpretation of Jesus 
rather than a biography or memoir of him. Its facts are 
selected with reference to a certain idea and are used to 
establish that idea, as we shall see. The writer of the 
Fourth Gospel has gone to the facts in the life of Jesus 
and drawn certain conclusions from them as to who Jesus 
was, just as you and I are about to go to such facts as we 
can gather from the Synoptic gospels to deduce conclusions 
of our own. 

The Gospel Accounts of Jesus. At this point, we 
search the Synoptics to see how Jesus regarded himself ; 
to see whether he looked upon himself as Almighty God, 
or as in any way lifted above the sphere of humanity. 
And I think we will reach the same conclusions that so 
eminent and fair a scholar as Professor Toy reaches 
in his great work on the relation between "Judaism and 
Christianity." Professor Toy, in his admirable chapter on 
"the relation of Jesus to Christianity," says, in substance : 

' ' It may fairly be said that the general impression left on 
us by the portraiture of Jesus in the Synoptics is that he lived 
and acted as other men ; that nothing was further from his 
mind than the desire to be looked on as a superhuman being. 
In his appeals to the people, in his more familiar intercourse 
with his disciples, in his arguments with his opponents, in his 
hours of prayer and of struggle he thought and spoke as a 
man." He claimed to be only a teacher of righteousness ; and 
certainly this was the impression received by some of his 
followers, — by the two who went to Emmaus, and by Peter 
himself, as will be shown. You remember the words of the 
two Jesus joined on the way to Emmaus after his resurrection? 
He asked them what they were discussing, and they sadly 
answered: "The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which 



JESUS CHRIST 105 

was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the 
people. We had hoped that it was he which should redeem 
Israel." No trace here that these disciples thought that their 
crucified leader was God or a superhuman being ! If Jesus 
claimed miraculous powers, the same claim was made by many 
others, prophets and apostles. As to the forgiveness of sins, 
he himself pointed out that this was no more a divine power 
than the gift of healing, and it is represented as belonging also 
to the disciples. Matt, xviii., 18: "Verily, I say unto you, 
what things soever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in 
heaven ; and whatsoever things ye shall loose on earth shall 
be loosed in heaven." 

The titles "Son of Man" and "Son of David" do not 
suggest a superhuman nature, nor, according to the Fourth 
Gospel, does a claim to such a nature reside in the title " Son 
of God." Turn to John x., and read from the thirtieth 
verse on : "I and the Father are one. The Jews took up 
stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, .... for 
which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered, 
For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy ; and 
because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus 
answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are 
gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God 
came . . . say ye of him whom the Father sanctified and sent 
into the world, Thou blasphemest ; because I said, I am a 
Son of God?" Here Jesus is represented as making an 
argument from the Old Testament (Ps. lxxxii., 6) : "I said, 
Ye are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High," to show 
that men might be called sons of God without making them 
equal with God or without blaspheming ; and, by parity of 
reasoning, showing that in saying that he was a son of God, 
he was not claiming for himself equality with God nor in any 
way blaspheming the Most High. His explanation and argu- 
ment satisfied the Jews, and they laid down their stones and he 
went his way. Had it been otherwise they would have stoned 
him or taken him before the Sanhedrin for trial. 



106 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Some one reading Jesus' declaration, "I and the Father 
are one," may ask what he meant by that if he did not mean 
that he and God were the same person. In what has just been 
said, light is shed on the question, and when we turn to 
John xvii., we see clearly Jesus' meaning from his prayer: 
' ' Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those that Thou 
hast given me, that they may be one as we are ; as thou, Father, 
art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us." 
These words make it evident that Jesus, by saying " I and the 
Father are one," meant that not only was he, like other men, 
a child or son of God, but that he was an obedient and 
responsive child and therefore at one, i. e., perfectly in harmony, 
with the spirit and will of his Father. 

Jesus Disclaims Deity. That Jesus never felt 
himself to be God or equal with God is apparent in 
such express disclaimers to deity and omnipotence and 
omniscience which he makes. He admits that he is 
ignorant of the time when certain things he has prophecied 
will happen. "But of that day or that hour knoweth no 
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but 
the Father." Speaking of his power, he expressly says 
(Matt, xxii., 18): "All power is given unto me in 
heaven and earth." Is given, — given, then, by the Being, 
to whom it of right belonged ; that is, God. Jesus 
frequently confesses his dependence on God thus : 
"Verily, verily, I say unto you the Son can do nothing of 
himself but what he seeth the Father doing." And not 
only does Jesus admit his reliance upon God, he attests 
it in his habit of prayer. And his prayers are not 
pretences nor self-comm linings : they are most real, and 
some of them such as come from human souls when in 
dire distress, — for instances, the prayer in Gethsemane ; 
and that on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?" 



JESUS CHRIST 107 

"With such evidence as lies before us, it seems reasonable 
to conclude that Jesus laid no claim, in thought or in word, to 
other than human nature and power. It would indeed be a note- 
worthy thing that a Jew of that period, with the profound Jewish 
sentiment of the unspeakable distance between God and man, 
should have overstepped the boundary, and being in human 
form, have equaled himself with the divine. For so remarka- 
ble a departure from the national thought we naturally demand 
clear evidence, and such evidence we do not find in the existing 
records of the life of Jesus." 

What His First Disciples Taught. If we ask 
how his immediate disciples regarded him, we will be still 
further convinced that he did not teach them to look upon 
him as God or a pre-existent being. One day, when Jesus 
and his disciples had reached Cassarea Phillippi, he turned 
to them and asked : " Who do men say that I, the Son of 
man, am?" And they said: "Some say John the Bap- 
tist ; some Elijah ; and others Jeremiah, or one of the 
prophets." Then Jesus said: "But who say ye that I 
am ? " And Simon Peter answered : " Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God." This reply pleased Jesus 
and satisfied him, and on the faith displayed in it, he said 
he would build his church. But what was in Peter's mind 
and what was implied in this answer? Did Peter think 
he was talking face to face with God, or a superhuman 
being come from God? No. In saying that Jesus was 
the Christ, Peter meant that he believed that Jesus was 
the Messiah ; the expected redeemer of Israel ; in opposi- 
tion to those who refused to believe it. This was a sub- 
lime faith, but it did not carry with it any belief in the 
deity or superhumanity of Jesus, for we know, says Pro- 
fessor Toy, that "the Jewish monotheistic thought seems 
always to have conceived of the Messiah both as completely 



108 GOOD SENSE, IN RELIGION 

subordinate to the Supreme Being and as an Israelite in 
origin and nature." And this idea, that Peter and the 
other disciples regarded Jesus as a man, although they 
held him to be the true Messiah, is substantiated by the 
language used by the disciples as they began to preach 
Christ after his ascension. Turn to the book of Acts 
and you will see that the first preaching after Jesus' death 
set him forth as a prophet. In Acts ii., 22, Moses is 
represented to have said : " A prophet shall the Lord God 
raise up from among your brethren, like unto me." Peter 
told his hearers that the crucified Jesus was this prophet, 
like unto Moses. Surely no one would say Moses was God 
or superhuman ! Peter opens one of his public addresses 
thus: "Ye men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of 
Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by mighty 
works and wonders and signs which God did by him in 
the midst of you," and so on. In other places, the early 
apostles speak of Jesus as a man and as the Messiah. 

Professor Andrew P. Peabody makes the comment that 
naturally would be made here by saying : ' ' If our Saviour 
were indeed the supreme God, a fact, no less striking and 
unaccountable than his own silence on the subject, is that the 
apostles did not proclaim him as God in their preaching to the 
unbelieving Jews and Gentiles. The cross, the ignominy, the 
lowly and suffering estate of Jesus, was the great stumbling- 
block to those among whom he preached ; and it was, therefore, 
a prime object with them to extol and exalt him, to set forth 
his claims upon the reverence of man, and to exhibit his 
intrinsic greatness and excellence. Was he, who was despised 
and rejected of men, indeed the Lord God Almighty? Of this 
fact, then, before all things else, would Peter have assured the 
unbelieving Jews, and Paul the inquisitive and credulous 
Athenians. This doctrine so momentous, could not have been 
suppressed in preaching to such a degree as not to find its way 



JESUS CHRIST 109 

into the numerous discourses contained in the Acts of the 
Apostles. If Peter and Paul did not preach it, they cannot 
have believed it. If they did preach it, the eminently careful, 
faithful historian, St. Luke, could not have omitted this most 
prominent and striking point in their preaching." 

Does not the evidence reviewed make it quite clear 
that Jesus himself and those disciples who knew him by 
personal contact considered that he was a man, like other 
men so far as origin and nature were concerned, but far 
above other men by reason of his office as the Messiah ? 
It seems to me that Professor Toy is right in holding that 
this is the conclusion any one would reach if he confined 
his study to the facts as presented in the Synoptic Gospels 
and ridded himself of certain theological prepossessions, 
and avoided the metaphysical subtleties of the Fourth 
Gospel. The simple humanity of Jesus is undeniably 
the teaching of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, 
and of the earliest disciples. 

Whence Any Other View? Whence came the 
doctrine that he was God, and the doctrine that he was 
a pre-existent being sent into this world by God on a 
mission ? 

Both doctrines grew. They came, as many another 
theological dogma has come, through speculation. Neither 
doctrine was known or taught in Christ's own day. Paul 
originated the idea that Jesus pre-existed ; and the 
champions of Athanasius as against Arius in the Council 
at Nicea, in 325, formulated the dogma that Jesus was 
"very God of very God." So that it was nearly 300 
years after Jesus' death that any one seriously held that he 
was God ! 

Paul's Doctrine of Jesus. Just how Paul reached 
his idea of Jesus, we do not know, because he has not 



110 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

told us in any of his writings. We may attribute it, in 
part, to his habit of spiritualizing the things of Christian 
faith. With Paul, baptism and resurrection were spiritual, 
and not physical, facts. So with him, the real Jesus 
became an ideal person — the Christ ; a divinely commis- 
sioned Messiah, who had renounced the glories of his 
pre-natal existence with God that he might endure the 
pain and sorrows of man, and by bearing the utmost 
force of evil which man can suffer or inflict might emanci- 
pate man from it. "Therefore, Paul regarded Christ's 
life in the flesh as an episode between a life in glory before 
his birth and a life in glory after his death, and thus took 
him out of all the ordinary conditions of humanity." 
And in so doing, as Professor Edward Caird pertinently 
remarks, "Paul seems to deny that union between- the 
human and the divine which was the essential lesson of 
the gospel of Jesus ; and he gives occasion to all those 
theological puzzles about the unity of two natures in one 
person in which the later theology of the church involved 
itself." 

The Fourth Gospel. The writers of the Fourth 
Gospel and of the Epistles to the Hebrews, Ephesians, and 
Colossians take a view of Jesus very similar to Paul's and 
were doubtless largely influenced in their ideas by Paul's 
teachings. According to these writings Jesus was the 
word or logos, i. e., the reason or thought, of God, made 
flesh. It is an open question whether the Fourth Gospel 
meant to teach that Jesus, as the logos or word, pre- 
existed in the mind of God simply as an idea (just as the 
universe was in the mind of God as an idea before it was 
really made), or whether Jesus pre-existed at the side of 
God as a person before he took up his abode on earth in 
the form of Jesus of Nazareth. There are grounds for 






JESUS CHRIST 111 

both views, and certain consequences flow from each. 
However, it is not necessary to go into the subtleties of 
this matter, even if we had time. We msf concede that 
some kind of a pre-existence of Jesus is taught by the 
writer of the Fourth Gospel ; and it is quite clear that 
his theory and the similar one of Hebrews, Ephesians, 
and Colossians prepared the way for the dogma of the 
identity of God and Jesus which was framed in the 
Nicene Creed. It is plain enough to me that in the 
Fourth Gospel we are dealing with a speculation as to the 
origin and nature of Jesus ; and fully one-half of the 
greatest New Testament critics agree that we are not 
dealing with the speculation of John the disciple but with 
that of some one who wrote the gospel bearing John's 
name, time uncertain but evidently while the ideas of Paul 
and a certain Alexandrian doctrine of the logos were cur- 
rent and influential. 

Why We Are Not Trinitarians. Be it noted at 
this point — and this is most significant — that neither Paul 
nor the author of John nor any other writer in the New 
Testament speaks of Jesus as though he were God. 
Everywhere, Jesus, although in some places highly exalted 
even unto pre-existence, is distinguished from and subor- 
dinated to God. "There is one God, the Father, and one 
Lord Jesus Christ," says Paul, and at the end "he shall 
deliver up his kingdom to God and be subjected to him 
who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in 
all." Now it is for the reason — and it is plainly a deci- 
sive one — that Jesus nowhere makes himself out to be 
God, and that none of his apostles allude to him as God, 
that Universalists, as a body, cannot and do not believe 
in the Deity of Jesus as defined in the Trinity. We find 
no sufficient sanction for that dogma in the Bible, there- 



112 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

fore, we frankly deny it. The ideas of Jesus that are set 
forth in the Scripture are these two, (1) his simple and 
perfect humanity; and (2) his pre-existence. And it is 
open to you and me and to all men to hold either of these 
two ideas of him. We cannot hold them both at the 
same time, because they are not identical nor compatible. 

Those who can believe that Paul and the writer of the 
Fourth Gospel knew more about Jesus than Jesus knew 
about himself and his immediate disciples knew about him, 
will doubtless accept the doctrine of the pre-existence of 
Jesus as a person ; while those who feel that Jesus knew 
himself and expressed himself quite clearly and was under- 
stood correctly by his chosen disciples, will doubtless 
accept the doctrine of the humanity of Jesus. For myself, 
I prefer the latter view. It is simple, rational, and help- 
ful. I believe the philosophers of this day are better 
able to appreciate Jesus than the philosophers shortly 
after his death, influenced as they were by the Alexandrian 
philosophy and certain Jewish notions of the distance and 
antagonisms between God and man. To me, Jesus of 
Nazareth was the man Christ Jesus ; a man conscious of 
profound sympathy with the divine mind ; a man dissatis- 
fied and distressed by the formality and folly of the pre- 
vailing religion ; a man who believed himself to be and 
was a prophet raised up by God with a message of 
salvation to men, whom he embraced in his deep and 
yearning love ; a man who, in the intensity of his con- 
scious union with the divine Father, knew himself to be 
the Son of God. I can use the very words of Dr. Hedge, 
one of the staunchest followers Jesus ever had, and say : 

"All we behold in Jesus is essentially human, — human 
in its rudiment and type and idea, if not customary in its 
manifestation. And, although providentially, officially, he 



JESUS CHRIST 113 

occupies a place peculiar to himself, — psychologically, there 
was nothing in him that is not, in its germ and possibility, in 
all men ; and which all, in the full unfolding of their humanity, 
may not hope to realize. Nowhere but in Jesus has our nature 
reached so ostensibly its true perfection ; and, but for him, we 
had not known what that nature is in its possibility and its 
calling — its highest and deepest capacity and strength." 

Now in this interpretation of Jesus, I am speaking for 
myself, not for my denomination, although many and an 
increasing number — may I not say a majority? — of our 
preachers and people are embracing it. I do not force 
the interpretation upon any one. I have given excellent 
Scriptural reasons for it, and am about to add some 
philosophical and Good Sense arguments in favor of it. 
It is within my province to commend this idea of who 
Jesus was, to your serious and prayerful thought. 

II. 

Objections Ansavered. I now proceed to consider 
certain objections usually made to the humanitarian view of 
Jesus, after which we will observe how wonderfully this 
view helps us in our ideas of God and of human possibilities. 

1. It cannot be said that the doctrine of the absolute 
humanity of Jesus is not biblical nor historical, for we 
have seen that it is both. 

2. A trite criticism on the humanitarian view of Jesus 
is that it makes him a "mere" man; But does not this 
objection show that, after all, it is the theory of man 
that has been at fault ? Are we not the victims of a false 
doctrine of human nature? When we find in popular 
hymnals that man is a ' f worm " and when we read in 
influential creeds that man is " wholly defiled in all the 
faculties and parts of his soul and body, and utterly 
indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and 






114 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

wholly inclined to all evil," then we begin to see why 
Jesus Christ has not been regarded as a man, for was he 
a " worm ? " and was he by nature " wholly inclined to all 
evil?" and we also see how the phrase "a mere man" has 
acquired a low meaning. The logical and theological 
necessities of the doctrines of the fall and total depravity 
of man, if no other reasons, have made it essential that 
Jesus be deified or be placed in a class all alone. But we 
do not believe that there ever was a Fall, and, therefore, we 
are under no logical nor theological necessity of regarding 
Jesus as something else than a man, providing the record 
of his life and other considerations justify a belief in his 
perfect humanity. 

A New Doctrine of Human Nature. What we 
need in this age, and what we are going to have, is a new 
doctrine of human nature. Jesus Christ lias put us on 
the track of a new appreciation of our humanity, and the 
theory of evolution has come forward to aid us in properly 
understanding the essential nature of man and his relation 
to his Creator. 

We must distinguish between the nature of a thing 
and its character. The nature of anything is its inherent 
powers ; those that belong to it as a being and constitute 
it what it is. Nature is from nascor, to be born. Hence, 
the nature of anything is what it is by birth. Character 
is what is wrought into or upon anything. Character 
comes from a Greek root, meaning "to cut into furrows 
or engrave." Hence, character is that which is cut into 
or engraved upon the nature. In other words, character 
is that which is produced out of the nature by develop- 
ment, cultivation or training. The character of a thing 
is not the nature of a thing, but the product of the nature 
under any given environment. So that the nature of man 



JESUS CHRIST 115 

is what man is by birth or origin ; his character is what he 
has become under cultivation. His character, therefore, 
may be good or bad, but his nature is ever the same. 
Indeed, to change his nature would be to destroy his 
humanity ; he would cease to be man. 

Now, is man by nature unique ; is he unlike every 
other existing being, or does the biblical saying that " God 
created man in his own image" hit the truth, affirming as 
it does that man by nature is like God? We have seen, 
in previous lectures, that the idea which holds that man 
is essentially, that is, by nature, God-like, is sound. 
True, mixed in with the nature of man are animal traits 
and tendencies which link him to his animal ancestors, but 
above these traits and tendencies and ruling over them are 
other faculties and powers not possessed by any other 
creature — namely, the reasoning faculty, freedom of the 
will, and a conscience — which link man to God imme- 
diately and vitally and continuously. These latter endow- 
ments or attainments make man, man ; they distinguish 
him from the rest of creation and ally him with God. In 
his nature, therefore, man is in the image of God ; which 
is to say, that man by nature is divine, for whatever is 
"of or like God" is divine. 

But the other theology will reply by saying "was 
divine " not " is divine " ; but our theology, in obedience 
to the teachings of evolution and anthropology, says "was 
and ever has been divine." If man was ever in the image 
of God, he has never lost that image ! His nature has 
always been the same. This is the testimony of history 
and science. It is a familiar and true saying that "human 
nature is the same everywhere." This, then, is the new 
doctrine of human nature which is growing up : 

"The old theology affirmed a difference between man's 



116 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

nature — until transformed by a supernatural change — and 
God's nature, as radical as the opposition between darkness 
and light, evil and good. Modern religion recognizes not only 
likeness, but absolute identity, in the divine and human essence. ' 
All thought — all living thought — seems to be moving to the 
recognition of a profound and intimate union between the 
human soul and the infinite source of life." 

" Draw if thou canst the mystic line 
Rightly severing His from thine, 
Which is human, which divine! " 

As far as nature goes, the dividing line can not be 
drawn, but what of character*} Must we not confess 
that while man is in the image of God by nature, he is 
not a perfect image of God by character? Character, 
remember, is that which is developed out of the nature, 
and is the product of the good or bad use of our powers 
and opportunities. Obviously, human character, taken 
as a whole or in part, as embracing all mankind or a single 
individual, is not the divine character. It shows charac- 
teristics of the divine, but is yet far from perfect. As 
character is an individual and not a racial thing, we must 
be careful in making sweeping generalizations, but we 
may truthfully say that mankind is imperfect and sinful. 
Hence, it is plain that if there is any gulf between God 
and man, it is not in man's nature, but in his character. 
God's character is "righteous and holy altogether." The 
character of no living man is altogether righteous and holy. 
This is where God and man are not at one. Here is where 
God and many men are even in opposition and must be 
opposed until such men turn round and put themselves in the 
way of becoming what they ought to be and are destined to 
be. But we are sure that the character of humanity is and 
ever has been improving ; and we believe that the capacities 
and powers of human nature can be unfolded so that they 



JESUS CHRIST 117 

will yield a symmetrical and perfect character — a character 
which will be like the character of God. So that man 
can be one with God both in nature and character ; he 
can be perfect even as his Father in heaven is perfect ! 

This, then, is an outline of the Universalist doctrine 
of man, — man by nature, divine ; man by character, not 
yet divine but in the process of development into divinity. 
What then is the difference between God and man? It 
has been well expressed by Lyman Abbott in these words : 

"I take it that the difference between God and man is 
two-fold, — one of quantity and one of quality, but not one of 
essence. God is infinite, man is finite — a difference of quan- 
tity ; God is pure, man is impure — a difference of quality." 

Man of course, must always differ from God in quan- 
tity, but it is possible for man to overcome the difference 
in quality, and so be at one with God. Jesus exemplifies 
this fact. 

TVho Was Jesus ? Indeed, in view of what has been 
said, we are able now to define the person of Jesus 
Christ, and see how truly human he was and at the same 
time how truly divine. By nature Jesus, owing to his 
true humanity, was, like other men, divine ; by character, 
he was, unlike other men, divine. Both by nature and by 
character, then, Jesus was divine, that is, God-like. He 
differed, then, from other men, in character and not in 
his nature. His character was perfect and righteous alto- 
gether. In the space of a few years Jesus developed a 
complete manhood. His character was an all-sided, perfect, 
symmetrical, sinless development of his nature. "Jesus 
increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and 
man." He was in all points tempted as we are ; yet he 
never yielded. Jesus grew ; he had a development. His 



118 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

character was not imposed upon him, but was evolved 
from within him. His character differed from other men's 
not in kind but in degree. It was a character such as 
certain men, Paul for example, have in part, and all are 
competent to have completely. Paul says : "We shall be 
like him." We shall "all attain unto a full-grown 
man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of 
Christ." 

Who, then, was Jesus Christ? He was a perfect man : 
the ideal, but not inimitable man. He was truly the Son 
of God, because like his Father by nature and in char- 
acter. He was truly the Son of Man, because like other 
men by nature and in the character possible to them. 

Now is not this a beautiful and rational and inspiring 
conception of' Jesus Christ? It is consonant with the 
record of his life and sayings, and it is acceptable to Good 
Sense. It obviates many difficulties, and takes away not 
one jot or tittle of the greatness and power of his life. 

I believe in the Divinity or Jesus ! When asked 
if Jesus was divine, those who hold this view can reply : 
Yes, divine by nature, as all men are ; and divine by 
character, as all men are coming to be. Therefore, 
I believe in the divinity of Jesus. And in that I believe 
in the divinity of Jesus, I believe in the divinity of man ! 
The divinity of humanity is one of the lessons of 
Christ's life! 

When it is said that to make Jesus a perfect man and 
nothing more is to make him a "mere" man, we can 
grandly and even indignantly say : " There is no mere 
man." There can be no mere man to those who believe 
in the essential divinity of human nature, and the possible 
divinity of every human character. There can be no 
mere man when we consider the worth of a human soul 



JESUS CHRIST 119 

as evidenced by the infinite pains and care the All-Father 
has taken to beget and perfect even the humblest soul ! 
The view which regards Jesus as a perfect man, does not 
degrade him ; it exalts humanity and forever writes the 
lie across the phrase " a mere man ! " 

3. Jesus a Leader of Humanity. If it be objected 
that to view Jesus as a perfect man is to destroy his 
spiritual leadership of the race, it can be truthfully replied 
that such is not the case. Jesus Christ is the spiritual 
leader of those who believe in his perfect humanity, and 
they follow him with the confidence that they can go 
wherever he leads. If viewed as God or as superhuman, 
Jesus Christ cannot be followed by man ; he cannot be 
imitated ; nor can his followers hope to become like him. 
As well might a glow-worm hope to become a star, as for 
man to hope to become God or superhuman, or even to 
emulate the earthly career of God or a superhuman being. 
But viewed as a man who had the appetites and passions 
and desires of human nature, and made them subservient 
to the loftiest ends ; who was subject in a true sense to 
the temptations and trials of humanity, but never yielded 
his integrity ; who had the aspirations of every human 
soul, and was able to fulfill them ; who longed to be like 
God, and had his longing met — viewed thus, and Jesus is 
an example that the weakest man can look up to in hope 
and that the strongest man can follow even unto perfection. 
It is the true humanity of Jesus that makes him the spiritual 
leader of men in a real and attractive way ; ever an 
example to be imitated and ever a guide to be followed 
and trusted. 

Jesus an Authority. "To be trusted?" some one 
asks. "Can you trust a man in religion; can he be 
an authority ? " Why not ? Must God himself or some 



120 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

special creature bring us the truth in this department? 
Granted that it is of vital import to mankind, yet is it 
impossible for God to reveal religious truth through a 
man, as he has revealed other truths through men? Shall 
we deny the authority of men in the regions of science 
and philosophy because they were men, and most of them 
imperfect men? If scientific and philosophic truth has 
come to the world through such imperfect men as Socrates, 
Plato, Copernicus, Kant, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Wal- 
lace, Spencer, and Fiske ; and religious truth through 
such imperfect men as Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and 
Moses, why not further truth and a greater quantum of 
truth through the perfect man Jesus ? Surely such a thing 
is not impossible nor is it improbable : indeed, it is a fact 
that truth has come into the world through Jesus Christ. 
But can he be trusted? Yes, just as every other witness 
of the truth is trusted, — in view of his ability to discover 
truth in his own realm and in view of the truth he dis- 
covers. Jesus Christ was fitted as no other man has ever 
been to discover and make known religious facts : by 
reason of his full humanity, he knew what was in man in 
potentiality ; and by reason of his oneness with God, he 
knew what was in God in reality : he knew the only and 
true God. And what he has revealed to the world stands 
upon its own feet. Truth is its own authority. 

Dr. Hedge says : ' ' On the whole we may say that truth is 
the only authority. He only speaks with authority who has that, 
and has it at first hand, who shows me the truth I had never 
seen before, or who makes me see it as I had never seen it 
before. And truth once seen may be safely left to its own oper- 
ation." 

That Christ was an authority in his own realm, is 
assented to by reason and is evidenced by the good influ- 



JESUS CHRIST 121 

ence that his teachings and life have had upon civilization 
and human attainment. 

What Jesus Really Did. But as a matter of fact, 
Jesns did not bring any new truth to light. Scholars 
assure us that "There was no new truth taught by Jesus. 
The gospel contains no precept so peculiar, no moral so 
sublime, that the learned will not find you chapter and 
verse of some rabbi or ethnic philosopher where the same 
thing has been said before." But what Jesus did do was to 
live out those grand old truths. He so lived that men 
were made to see the old truths as they had never seen 
them before. So, while the doctrine was not new, the 
life was, and it has ever since been drawing all men 
unto it. 

Xow, what has Jesus Christ done for his race? He 
lias done many glorious things, but the grandest are these : 
1, he has revealed the nature and character of God to it 
as it had never been revealed before; 2, he has revealed 
the nature and possibilities of man as they had never been 
dreamed of before. 

Jesus Manifested God. As I trace the revelation 
of God culminating with Jesus Christ, notice that the 
successive unveilings have been wrought by men, showing 
that it has not needed a humanized God nor a superhuman 
being to acquaint us with the mind and heart of the 
Almighty. 

The character of God has been dimly understood in all 
ages, and somewhat manifested by noble men at different 
times. Mahomet dwelt on His supreme sovereignty ; Zoroaster 
upon His purity. Buddha did not know Him at all, but fore- 
shadowed His love of mankind in his own life of loving 
service. It is the history of the Hebrew race that enables us 



122 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

to trace the progressive revelation of the character of the true 
God. By a legitimate use of our imagination, we can think 
of God as the Great Love, who, before the universe began, 
felt the yearning for company and for some one on whom He 
might lavish His love and to whom He might express His 
goodness. This yearning begat the Universe. Out of His 
own being, came the worlds. One by one they grew and took 
their appointed places. When the music of the spheres had 
begun its play, animate creation marched into being, and the 
hum of life was added to the world-symphony. As the ages 
pass along, man emerges, stands erect, the crown and glory 
of creation, endowed to see and share his Creator's love. 
Slowly, but surely, he perceives the meaning of life, and refers 
it to powers not his own that gave it and preserve it. These 
powers are reverenced and worshiped. They are appealed to. 
Man is feeling after the true God if haply he may find him ! 
The years go by. Presently some one writes : " In the begin- 
ning Elohim created the heavens and the earth," and man begins 
to see that the universe is a creation. Presently, the universe 
and all that is in it, is discerned as the work of but one God ; 
and Jehovah is his name. The unity of God's nature is now 
comprehended. A Hebrew statesman and prophet climbs Mt. 
Sinai and comes down with a tablet, containing the laws of 
Jehovah, and God's character begins to be manifest : He is a 
law-giver and a law-lover. For a time men regard him as 
stern and exacting ; they call him Judge. But God is coming 
into sight more clearly. Moses speaks of him as gracious, 
compassionate, long-suffering, abounding in mercy and faith- 
fulness. The years pass along. The harp is struck, and 
David is singing : " The Lord is my shepherd." Out of deep 
sorrow and contrition, the Psalmist lifts his voice to tell all the 
world that God is interested in men, as an Eastern shepherd in 
his sheep, and is leading them through dark valleys and thorny 
places to green pastures, beside still waters. From the pro- 
tection to the love of God is but a short step, and Isaiah and 
Jeremiah and Hosea speak of that love. In all these revela- 



JESUS CHRIST 123 

tions men and not superhuman beings are revealing truths 
about God. But in all these discoveries Jehovah is the God 
of Israel only — its law-giver, its shepherd, its lover. The 
centuries pass by. The voice of the sacred singer is hushed ; 
the cry of the last prophet is silenced. There is a long pause. 
And then the veil is lifted again, yea, it is drawn completely 
aside, and the character of God is seen in all its beauty and 
fulness. Jesus of Nazareth discerns it, is flooded with its 
radiance, filled with the glory of Him it reflects, and he goes 
forth with the message that God is love, and that He is a 
Father, and that He loves and is the Father, not of the Jews 
alone, but of all mankind. Now the revelation is complete, 
and God's character is fully known. Thus, step by step, epoch 
after epoch, we trace the growth of the knowledge of God, 
until it culminates in the revelation made by Jesus ! 

And here is where the uniqueness of Christ's revela- 
tion came in. He did more than merely say that God 
loved all men and felt as a parent toward all men ; he 
exemplified God's love and fatherly solicitude by deeds 
of love and a life of constant self-sacrificing endeavor to 
save men from their sin and folly. He taught that his 
love and his devotion to humanity reflected his Father's 
love and devotion to His children. 

"And so we believe that there is forever in God that which 
is manifested in what Jesus Christ was and did. I want to 
know about God : His power I see in nature ; His feelings 
toward men, in Jesus Christ. Does God care for the poor? 
Nature seems sometimes to say, ' Only to crush them ; ' Jesus 
preached the glad tidings to them, and fed them. Does God 
care for the sick ? Jesus went about healing diseases. Does 
God have sympathy for those who have broken his laws? 
Jesus prayed for them who crucified him. Does God care for 
the sorrowful? At the grave of Lazarus, Jesus wept. Does 
God regard the masses who struggle in sorrow and pain? 
Jesus cried, ' Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy 



124 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

laden, and I will give you rest.' Does God really love men? 
The life of Christ, the teachings of Christ, the death of Christ, 
all answer : ' He seeks to save that which is lost.' " As Starr 
King splendidly said : " God is an infinite Christ." * 

Jesus Manifested Man. The other sublime thing 
that Jesus has done for his race^and especially does this 
appear if we take the humanitarian view of him — he has 
manifested the dignity and capacity of human nature. He 
shows man what man is, and is to be ! He not only says 
to man, " Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect ; " 
but he virtually says : "Be perfect, because I, a man, have 
become perfect. What I have done you can do. Follow 
me ! " Jesus found his own nature at one with the divine 
essence that is in all men, and he felt that his character 
could become like the character of that same divine 
essence, and so he gave himself up to the will of God, 
permitted the spirit of the All-Father to play upon and 
through him, fought his moral battles in full sight of 

*" We are beginning to see that the Incarnation is something differ- 
ent from God and man— God coming down to the earth and walking 
along side of man and joined to him and making a God-man that is 
neither truly God nor man. We are coming to see that the true Incar- 
nation is God in humanity; and we preach a Jesus Christ that is a man 
like other men, whom God chose to be his tabernacle. It is the glory of 
God that God could enter into man, and the glory of humanity that God 
was willing to enter into man. And this is the doctrine of the divinity 
of Jesus Christ: not that he is a being set apart from humanity, not a 
being somehow different from other men, not a different kind of man 
from us, but a man born like other men, in whom God the Eternal 
dwelt, filling him to the full and radiating life from each touch of his 
hand, every intonation of his voice, every movement of his feet, every 
pulsation of his heart— God in man. That is tlie glory of the Passion 
week; the glory of Bethlehem, the glory of the Crucifixion, the glory of 
the Resurrection — that God entered into human life, and Jesus walked 
the path that all his followers can walk, because he was a man, and 
they are men, and man is God's child. It is not a smaller view of 
Incarnation than the older view, it is a larger and a diviner view." 
(Lyman Abbott, Christian Union, May 20, 1893.) 



JESUS CHRIST 125 

God's approval and tendance, and at last became a man 
in every sense of that glorious word. And then he turned 
and looked at other men ; his eye went straight to their 
natures ; he read them ; he understood that they were akin 
to his own ; he saw the divinity there ; he saw the possible 
man there, and he said, man is the child of God ; all men 
are God's children. They most look up ; they can look 
up ; I will help them ; I will guide them ! And so he 
lived and taught and worked, to make men feel the glory 
of their humanity, and the grandeur of their destiny ; to give 
men courage in their battle with appetites and passions ; 
to give men hope and good cheer in their struggle after 
righteousness. In his sight there was no mere man ; in 
his pathway no human soul was ever spurned as a 
worm. No ! no ! But on every side his open hand was 
extended to the poor, the vicious, the sorrowing, the per- 
secuted. And in every word, there went forth his belief 
that here was a child of God, to whom it was his privilege 
to make known his inherent divinity and high destiny. 

And that man might never forget his relation to God 
and God's attitude toward him, he told a beautiful story, — 
beautiful in its sequel but sad in its implications, — of the 
boy who took his inheritance and went away from home 
and lived riotously ; fell so low that he became almost 
brutish again ; disfigured the image of his parent until it 
was almost obliterated. Of how, in the midst of his 
degradation, "he came to himself"; the old whisperings 
of love and home were heard in his soul, and he looked 
up, with tears in his eyes, and faced homeward. And 
there, upon the threshold of the old home, stood his 
father, waiting ! and as he leaped into those open arms, he 
heard the words, "This is my child that was lost and is 
found again. " God's child through it all ! and God waiting: 



126 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and expecting the home-coming of his child ! Never, so 
long as that touching story is in the human mind, can 
man forget his relation to God and God's attitude toward 
him ; never can man look down nor feel that he is not God's 
child and that God does not love him and wait for him ! 

The Secret oe Jesus' Power. Do you ever wonder 
why Jesus Christ is such a power in the world ? This is 
the explanation. It is due to his revelation of the dignity 
and possibilities of human nature, and the unchangeable 
relation that God bears to his children. He that discerns 
in humanity its divinity and calls it forth by his own life 
and promises, can never be ought than a power! And 
as men come more and more to believe themselves the 
children of God and capable of becoming like Jesus Christ, 
humanity will progress towards righteousness as it has 
never done in the past ; and Jesus Christ's leadership will 
increase in its universality and power. Man is longing to 
know what he is, and what he can become, and Jesus 
Christ answers his cry and shows him the way. And as 
Correggio, gazing upon Raphael's St. Cecilia, felt within 
himself an awakening power and exclaimed, "I, too, am 
a painter ! " so man, gazing upon the life and attainment 
of Jesus Christ, will feel an awakening affinity and will 
say, "I, too, am a Son of God ! I can be like him!" Oh, 
we do not rob Christ of his power by making him a man ; 
we increase it ; we increase it a thousand fold ! 

And when the pulpit takes hold of these two ideas, — 
man a child of God, and Jesus Christ a full-grown man — 
an example of what man can be and is to be and ought to 
be — then will it be of new force in the world ; then will 
the preacher have reason for his enthusiasm for humanity, 
and his words will stir men to nobler living and grander 
hoping and diviner attainment ! 



LECTURE VII 
SALVATION 

" Salvation has a large and practical meaning. It involves something 
more than rescue from future perdition." — Dr. Behrends. 

The subject of salvation would have no interest for us 
if we were not human beings. The fishes, the beasts, 
the insects and the birds do not bother themselves about 
salvation : they do not look with earnest and confident 
gaze for better things for themselves and their posterity. 
Man is the only being that longs for and strives after a 
larger and diviner life. He alone has the passion for 
progress ; and he alone has the capacity for spiritual 
improvement. Therefore, he is intensely interested in a 
subject like this, dealing as it does with the problems of 
his duty and destiny. 

As one ponders this matter of salvation, he is led to 
raise three questions : Why does man need to be saved ? 
What is he to be saved from? How is he to be saved? 

These questions have been asked from time immemorial 
and have been dealt with by almost every religious teacher. 
Every religion seems to have its reason for and means 
of salvation. Christianity poses before the world as 
having the one and only key to the secret. Perhaps 
I had better say that " evangelical " Christianity does this 
thing, for there are some Christian sects that dare not say 
that those who never heard of Jesus Christ are beyond the 
possibility of salvation. 

As touching " evangelical " Christianity , we are more 



128 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

or less familiar with its answers to the three questions just 
raised. In answer to the query : " Why does man need 
to be saved ? " it says, "Because he is a sinner." In reply 
to the question " What is he to be saved from ? " it says : 
"From depravity and perdition," or "from Satan and 
hell." In response to the inquiry: "How is he to be 
saved?" it says : "Through participation, by faith, in the 
atonement of Jesus Christ." 

The assumptions here have so grave and wide-spread 
consequences that we ought to look into this theology 
quite closely. If it be true, we should accept it and 
espouse it with tremendous fervor. If it be false, we 
should reject it forthwith ; and give ourselves and our 
fellows a truer theory. The reasoning pursued in this 
theology is as follows : Man was "specially created " by God. 

" The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground 
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man 
became a living soul." The Westminster Confession of Faith 
says : " Man at first, had a reasonable and immortal soul, 
endued with knowledge, and righteousness, and true holiness 
after God's own image, having the law of God written in his 
heart and power to fulfill it. His will was free to keep or 
transgress the law, but disposed to good." 

Adam and Eve thus endowed and constituted, were 
placed in the garden of Eden. . Upon the scene of their 
felicity and promise glides a sinuous betrayer, and under 
his soft glances and winsome seductions, Eve is led to 
disobey the command of God, and her husband is induced 
to join her in her unholy step. This was the Fall. It 
was, according to the theology under consideration, the 
work of the Devil, who assumed the shape of a serpent to 
accomplish his intention. 

Hence the Westminster Confession says : " Our first parents 



SALVATION 129 

being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned 
in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin God was pleased 
according to his wise and holy counsel to permit, having 
purposed to order it for his own glory." 

And now came the fearful consequences of that sin. 
God finds what Adam and Eye have done. He curses 
the serpent and curses Adam and Eye and their progeny 
and drives them from the garden, never to re-enter it. 
(rod turns his back on his children and sets them adrift in 
a strange universe to toil and suffer and die and go to hell ! 

The Westminster Confession continues : ' ' By this sin they 
fell from original righteousness and communion with God, and 
so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties 
and parts of soul and body. They being the root of all man- 
kind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in 
sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descend- 
ing from them by ordinary generation. From this original 
corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and 
made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do 
proceed all actual transgressions." 

In other, and awful words, mankind, from that time, 
has been totally depraved, the child and servant of the 
Devil, under the curse and wrath of God ! 

Xow, in what has been said, all Protestant churches, 
excepting the Unitarian and Universalists, agree. Up to 
this point, the Westminster Confession of Faith is assented 
to in substance by all but the liberal sects. Calvinists 
and Arminians alike hold to the fallen and reprobate 
condition of mankind. 

But there is a division among the "evangelical" sects 
when they begin to ask whether all men can be recovered 
from this fallen state and the perdition that stares them 



130 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

horribly in the face. The Calvinists say, ne ; and the 
Arminians say, yes. 

The Calvinists, or those who accept the Westminster 
Confession strictly, say emphatically that all cannot be 
saved. They hold that the entire programme of this life 
was laid out in the beginning and that everything trans- 
pires according to the intention of God. Hence, they 
declare that God knew Adam and Eve would sin ; indeed, 
he had picked out a certain number of human beings for 
everlasting happiness and a certain number for everlasting 
torment ; and those that are predestined for hell shall 
go there ; for them there is no salvation. 

Here are the awful words of the Confession : "God from 
eternity, freely and unchangeably, ordained whatsoever comes 
to pass. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his 
glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting 
life and others foreordained to everlasting death. The number 
is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or 
diminished." 

One is constrained to exclaim, Surely no one in this 
enlightened age — no one with a heart — believes such 
teaching ! but the amazing fact is that the Westminster 
Confession of Faith is subscribed to by over 4,000,000 
Protestants in America alone. The Presbyterians, the 
Regular Baptists in the South, the conservative Lutherans, 
the conservative Congregationalists, the Reformed German 
and the Reformed Dutch churches are all Calvinistic, and, 
therefore, they believe (or profess to believe) in foreordi- 
nation and pretention. 

The Arminians — those who hold the tenets of Arminius, 
a Dutch divine — reject the Westminster Confession of 
Faith in those parts where it teaches a limited salvation, 
and declare that all men can be saved, providing certain 



SALVATION 131 

things take 1 place, but they limit the possibility of salvation 
to this world. One must be saved here or not at all. 
The churches that subscribe to the tenets of Arminius are 
the Methodists, the Free Baptists, Regular Baptists in the 
North, the Episcopalians, the liberal Lutherans, the liberal 
Conore2;ationalists an d certain lesser sects. 

Strange to relate, although the Calvinists and Armin- 
ians part company on the number that may be saved, they 
come together again on their theory of how man is saved. 
They both hold that salvation is accomplished through the 
atonement of Jesus Christ ; and they both insist that faith 
in the atonement of Christ is sufficient to salvation. In- 
deed, faith in the atoning blood of Christ is deemed so 
necessary to salvation by the Arminian churches that they 
declare that unless one have it, no matter how moral he 
may be, he is lost. Mr. Spurgeon used to say : " Be as 
good as you please, be as moral as you can, be as honest 
as you will, walk as uprightly as you may, there stands 
the unchangeable threatenino; : " He that believeth not 
shall be damned." Therefore, the dogma of the atone- 
ment, is the central and vital thing in the "evangelical" 
theory of redemption. 

In view of the importance of the atonement and in 
view of the consequences for good or evil to those who 
accept or reject it, we should suppose that those who 
taught it, would have a very clear idea of what the atone- 
ment was and would be able to say right off how it satisfies 
the justice of God and delivers man from God's wrath and 
Satan's power. But, startling as it is, such is not the 
case. Competent authorities confess that those who teach 
the atonement have no uniform and settled opinion as to 
how it saves any one from damnation. Dr. Bushnell, one 
of the most eminent theologians orthodoxy has produced 



132 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

in modern times, in his book on "God in Christ," speaks 
of the great division in the minds of the orthodox as to 
the meaning of the atonement. 

He says : ' ' On the whole I know of no definite and fixed 
point on which the orthodox view, so called, may be said to 
hang, unless it is this : that Christ suffers evil as evil, or in 
direct and simple substitution for evil that was to be suffered 
by us." And then he goes on to oppose that doctrine and to say 
that it cannot be sustained ; that he cannot defend it. Henry 
Ward Beecher once declared with tremendous earnestness, 
"The idea that God had determined to destroy the whole 
world and that Jesus Christ said : ' I will go on earth and die 
in their stead,' is a doctrine as infernal as if it had come from 
the bottomless pit." 

Now, where there is radical disagreement among the 
defenders of a dogma as to the very dogma they would 
uphold, there is likely to be something wrong with the 
premises on which the dogma depends. And since the 
central idea in the current evangelical scheme of redemp- 
tion — namely, the atonement — is in dispute among its 
defenders, a seeker for the truth may fairly inquire whether 
the whole scheme is not un-Christian and unreasonable. 
It has such a pagan look and sounds so unlike the teaching 
of Jesus that we are more than half inclined at the outset 
of our inquiry to believe Dr. T. T. Munger, who says : 

"The doctrines of divine sovereignty, of total depravity, 
and of the atonement are shot through with colors drawn from 
the corruption of Roman society, from the Roman sense of 
authority and the Roman form of justice. . . . There is no 
denial of the fact that doctrines now regarded as parts of 
orthodoxy are the reflections of the social condition in which 
they were formulated. The Bible furnished isolated texts for 
holding these conceptions, but the Bible, as a whole, did not 



SALVATION 133 

furnish the conceptions ; had it been used to furnish conceptions 
of doctrines, we would not have what goes for orthodoxy." 

This is the intelligent and frank judgment of a Con- 
gregationalist, and we can verify it as regards this subject 
of salvation, and we shall substantiate it further in the 
lectures to come. 

A Criticism. To criticise a theory that assumes to 
be Christian we must bring it to the words of Jesus and 
not the creeds nor to any apostle whose doctrines are 
counter to his. Take, then, the fundamental ideas of the 
orthodox theory and see if they are supported either by 
the language or conduct of Jesus. The fundamental ideas 
are : 1, that man is totally depraved, the child of Satan 
and enemy of God ; 2, that God is angry with man and 
has consigned him to perdition ; 3, that Jesus Christ, who 
was God the Son (t\ e., God himself), came into the world 
and by his suffering and death appeased the wrath and sat- 
isfied the justice of God the Father on the one hand ; and 
rescued man from the Devil and opened to him the pos- 
sibility of salvation, on the other hand. Now read the 
words of Jesus with these ideas in mind, and see how 
quickly you conclude that they are not founded in his 
sayings. 

Christ's Portraiture of God. The Fourth Gospel 
distinctly says that " God so loved the world that he gave 
his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him 
might not perish but have eternal life." It is a loving, 
not an angry, God, who sends a loved son, to deliver a 
loved people. Take the story of the Prodigal Son. What 
does that represent? An erring child and a wrathful 
parent ? or an erring child and a sorrowing parent who is 
watching and waiting for his return, glad all through 
when his boy finally comes home ? Take the parable of 



134 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

the lost sheep. What does that mean? A wandering, 
willful child and a father with a stony heart oblivious of 
his wanderings ? or, a child astray in life and his loving 
parent in anxious search of him ? — searching until he, even 
the very last, is found? These parables and a multitude 
of the sayings of Jesus teach but one lesson — and it is 
diametrically opposed to the dogma of an angry, with- 
drawn Deity — they teach that God loves all his children, 
sinful though they are, and is seeking in every fatherly 
way to have them love him and become like him. 

Christ's Doctrine of Salvation. 1. What men are 
to be saved from. Jesus teaches that men are to be 
saved from their sins, and not from a personal Devil nor 
from a revengeful God, nor from the consequences of 
wrong-doing. Joseph and Mary named their son Jesus, 
because it had been told them that he was to save his 
people from their sins. And Jesus explicitly declared — ■ 
and his statement is recorded by Matthew, Mark, and 
Luke — "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to 
repentance." This declaration, by the way, implies that 
there were righteous people in the world in his day, and 
thus denies the dogma of total depravity. Indeed, Jesus, in 
his appeals to men to be righteous, assumes that they have 
the power to "go and sin no more." He nowhere says and 
nowhere implies that sinners are unable of themselves to 
repent and become good. You may be surprised, but it 
is the significant fact, that Jesus never mentions Adam, 
Eve, or Eden, or refers to the story of the Fall in any 
way. Therefore he never refers to the doctrine of total 
depravity, nor does he imply that the souls he addresses 
are not able to respond. 

2. How Salvation is Accomplished. As to how 
sinners are saved, Jesus certainly does not teach that his 



SALVATION 135 

death is to save them ; nor that the process is at all super- 
natural or magical. True, Jesus is reported as saying in 
one place, and in one place only, that he came to give his 
life a "ransom" for many, but this may be understood to 
mean that his sufferings would lead many through sympathy 
to him and thence to the kind of life he lived. Jesus 
came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give 
his whole life of loving, helpful, self-sacrificing service to 
delivering man from his bondage to sin. "I am come," 
he said, " that they might have life and have it more 
abundantly." How were they to get this life? By abiding 
in him ; by doing his commandments — that is, by striving 
after it under his guidance and inspiration. Of course, 
Jesus demands that his followers have faith in him, but 
the faith he demands is not a simple intellectual assent to 
his claims, nor does he teach that it is sufficient to save. 
The faith that Jesus wants is that confidence in him which 
leads the believer to strive to live as he lived — at one with 
God and at one with humanity. James, the brother of 
Jesus, interpreted Christ's idea correctly when he said : 
"Faith without works is dead," for Jesus himself declared : 
"Xot every one that saith unto me 'Lord, Lord,' shall 
enter into the kingdom of heaven," — that is, not every 
one who merely says, "I have faith in the atoning blood 
of Jesus," shall be saved, — ""but he that doeth the will of 
my Father which is in heaven," — that is, he who lives in 
obedience to the commands of God shall enter into the 
kingdom. This is why Jesus never told men who needed 
and wanted to be saved to simply have faith in him, but 
rather commanded them to " Seek first the kingdom of 
God and his righteousness ; " " to be perfect as their 
Father in heaven was perfect." Such seeking after right- 
eousness would lead to the perfection of God. The 



136 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

perfection of God is synonymous with that oneness with 
God on which Jesus so lovingly and earnestly dwells. In 
the mind of Jesus this oneness with God — this harmony 
of the human character with the divine character — was 
salvation. Therefore, his daily prayer and daily endeavor 
was that men might become one with God even as he and 
the Father were one. And he sought to bring man and 
God together in this close and beautiful and enduring way 
here in this world by means of his teachings and example. 
He shows no nervous solicitude about the future world. 
He knows that after his death, if there be any souls still 
disobedient to God — if there be any spirits in prison — he 
will visit them and lead them out into oneness with their 
Parent. When Jesus dwells at all upon the efficacy of 
his death, it is with the thought that it will release him 
from his body and its natural limitations and enable his 
influence to be world-wide and all-powerful. And there- 
fore, he says, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me." Notice that he does not say, "I will lift up all 
men at the same time that I am lifted up," but that rf I 
will draw all men unto me." He will attract them to 
himself and thence to the fullness of righteousness that 
was in him, and hence, to God-likeness. 

Now, these are the teachings of Jesus regarding the 
condition of man and the way of salvation. To him, men 
are sinful. He does not explain how they came to be so ; 
he accepts the situation, and teaches that salvation is 
deliverance from sin. He assumes that all men can be 
saved, and that every man plays an important part in his 
own redemption. He deems himself a servant of God, 
whom he represents as loving and searching for his chil- 
dren — a servant of God commanded to seek and to save 
the lost by leading them through repentance and imitation 



SALVATION 137 

to oneness of life with him and his heavenly Father. In 
other words, Jesus' mission was to help the sinful man "to 
come to himself," and to say, "I will arise and go to my 
Father," and to see that he was well started on the road 
homeward. Plainly, such teachings afford no foundation 
for a creed that declares God to be angry with men ; every 
man totally depraved, at enmity with God and in servitude 
to the Devil; and salvation, deliverance from the conse- 
quences of sin, original and actual, simply through faith — 
even blind faith — in the atoning blood of Jesus. There- 
fore, we must set the creeds of "evangelical" Christianity 
aside, and take the hand of our Brother and Leader, Jesus 
Christ, and walk with him out of the shadow and bondage 
of sin into the glorious light and freedom of a life with God. 
The Origin of the Evangelical Doctrine. Now 
I am perfectly aware what the Scriptural warrants are on 
which the " evangelical" creeds rest their theories of 
human nature and salvation. They base their arguments 
on the Genesis story of the Creation, and on the writings 
of St. Paul. («) But w T e have seen in previous lectures 
that Genesis claims no divine warrant for its statements 
and that modern discoveries have squarely contradicted its 
account of creation and the Eden incidents. The origin 
of man and his primitive condition and subsequent behavior 
as told by biology and history leave no place for the Gen- 
esis stories save among the legends of the past. That those 
legends have been made the basis of a tremendous system 
of theology is not the fault of their authors. That that 
system of theology must fall with their fall from history to 
legend is inevitable and, on the whole, desirable, (b) As 
to the teachings of St. Paul let us be candid. We must 
admit that he is not consistent. In one place he declares 
that man can do nothing toward his own salvation, that 



138 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

God can save and God alone — thus teaching that man is 
to be saved by faith ; but in another place he tells men to 
work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, thus 
implying that man can do something toward saving himself 
and indicating that faith, simple faith, is not all that is 
necessary to salvation. Paul does indeed lay stress on the 
saving efficacy of Christ's death, but he also emphasizes 
the saving power of Christ's life, for he distinctly says : 
"Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are 
changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the 
spirit of the Lord." Christ's illustrious life draws men 
who study it intently and lovingly unto itself, and it will 
draw them until they all attain unto " a full-grown man, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 
Paul's definition of salvation is the same as Jesus', namely, 
the reconciliation of man to God. With Paul as with 
Jesus, it is man who needs to be reconciled to God,~not 
vice versa, as the creeds would have us believe. Here 
are his words : " God was in Christ reconciling the world 
to himself." We must admit that in Paul's theology this 
reconciliation is effected through the mediation and death 
of Jesus, but whether Paul teaches that man's part in the 
process is purely a passive one, a matter of faith and faith 
alone, it is impossible to determine from the Apostle's writ- 
ings, simply because, as I have pointed out, he is not 
consistent. His statements are contradictory. Under the 
circumstances, it is scholarly and proper to turn to Jesus 
and accept his ideas on the subject. A Christian should 
accept Jesus before and above Paul, just as he ought to 
accept Jesus before and above the creeds. And in fol- 
lowing Jesus we come, as has been shown, to regard 
salvation as he did, — as deliverance from sin, through 
personal endeavor after the righteousness of God. 






SALVATION 139 

The Universalist Doctrine of Salvation. With 
the present " evangelical " theory of salvation thus over- 
thrown bv the language of Jesus, we needs must o-ive the 
race a new and better one. I would never take any 
religious idea from any man, no matter what the idea 
was, unless I could give to him immediately something 
better in its stead. A mere destructionist is not a true 
follower of Jesus, nor a true friend of humanity. Christ 
came not to destroy but to fulfill. He had to destroy in 
order to fulfill, but his aim was fulfillment rather than 
destruction. And that has been my aim throughout these 
lectures. If I have seemed iconoclastic it has been because 
it was impossible to be constructive without first tearing- 
down. It is the purpose of my Church to build up faith 
rather than shatter or abolish it. We deny in order to 
affirm. We would take away what we believe to be 
neither true nor wholesome, that we may give what is true 
and good. Accordingly, the Universalis! church comes 
to men concerning this great subject of salvation, and says : 
"Come, let us reason together. Let us ask ourselves 
frankly and seriously, what does man as we know him 
really needs to be saved from ? What do we ourselves 
stand in need of deliverance from ? " How shall we deter- 
mine the matter? By what the creeds say? By what 
the Bible says ? Or, by an appeal to our own nature and 
condition? I believe Professor Du Bose speaks the truth 
in saying : " What salvation means and specifically what 
our salvation means is a matter primarily not determined 
by creeds, not by scripture, not by divine revelation, but 
by the facts of our own nature and condition." To arrive 
at a clear and true knowledge of what man stands in need 
of salvation from, we must study man in the light of his 
origin, present condition, and possible destiny. We must 



140 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

also see what the forces are outside him, as well as within 
him, that tend to retard or defeat his progress toward his 
destiny. It is a difficult study, but if it be made wisely 
and perseveringly it will lead us to understand the what 
and the how of human redemption. 

What We Do Not Need to be Saved From : (1.) 
A personal Devil. Milton's "Paradise Lost" and 
Dante's " Inferno " have made Satan as vividly real as any 
diabolical myth could be made, but modern knowledge 
and modern orood sense are fast relegating Satan to the 
poems that have enshrined him ; and those poems are 
rapidly accumulating the dust of neglect. The whole 
notion of a personal Devil is a pagan notion, and it has 
been stabbed through the heart by the sword of investiga- 
tion in the hands of science and philosophy. The idea 
that a malevolent being is warring with God and tempting 
men is irrational, and even unscriptural. James gives us 
the New Testament idea of source of temptation and sin 
where he says : " Each man is tempted by his own lust, 
being drawn away by it and enticed. Be not deceived, 
my beloved brethren." 

(2). Man needs no rescue from a personal evil 
adversary, neither does he need to be saved from an 
angry God, for if Jesus spake of and represented God 
truly, as we believe he did, God is not wrathy with us. 
God knows our frame ; he remembers that we are dust ; 
that we are frail; that we contend against heredity and 
unhappy circumstances at times. Like as a father pities 
his children so the Lord pities them that dread him, — he 
looks sorrowfully on those that fear him, sad to think that 
his children could so misunderstand him as to imagine that 
he hates them. No, beloved, God is not wrathy with us. 
If the flowers in the spring-time, if the birds in the leafy 



SALVATION 141 

trees, if the blue sky above, if the white blanket on the 
earth to-night, if the sanity of man, if the satisfactions 
that lie everywhere for all the best and noblest longings of 
our souls sig;nifv anything, thev attest God's love for us. 

" The ancient Gods are dead, 
No Roman despot sits on heaven's throne, 
Dispensing favors by his will alone; 
Sends some to heaven and some to lowest hell, 
In nnprogressive woe or bliss to dwell; 
Demands no horrid sacrifice of blood, 
Nor nails his victim to the cruel wood 
In others' guilty stead. 

" The ancient Gods are dead. 
Law rules majestic in the courts above 
And has no moods, but, hand in hand with love, 
Sweeps through the universe, and smiling, sees 
The spheres, obedient to her vast decrees, 
Proclaims all men the sons, not slaves, of God, 
And breathes the message of his Fatherhood. 
The true God is not dead." 

Here is the fact : God hates sin. He does not want 
it and he will not have it in his universe. But he loves 
the sinner, not because he is a sinner, but because he is 
his child. And what is more, God suffers with the sinner, 
as every loving parent suffers when its child does evil. 
Therefore, it would be truer to say we need to be saved 
from a loving rather than an angry God, that is, we need 
to be helped out of a state of living which causes our 
heavenly Father's heart to bleed. 

(3). Another thing we do not or should not want to 
be saved from is merited punishment for wrong-doing. 
One of the worst doctrines that has ever been taught to 
men is that they can escape punishment for sin and that 
they should try to do so. It is a vicious idea that leads any 
man to think that he can by any possibility avoid or evade 
the consequences of his sinfulness, or his disregard of 



142 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

natural laws. The Universalist church has, of late years, 
set its face sternly against such a monstrous doctrine. It 
has said, although people persist in misunderstanding and 
misrepresenting its teachings, that the consequences of evil 
are unescapable. " Though hand joined in hand, the 
wicked shall not go unpunished " ; " Whatsoever a man 
soweth that shall he also reap." Those are Universalist 
texts. They should never fade from the memory of any 
mind. We believe in punishment ; in its absolute certainty, 
both in this world and the world to come if deserved there 
as it is here. We believe that punishment for sin is not 
deferred ; it comes right along with the sin as its concom- 
itant. As virtue is its own reward, so sin is its own 
retribution. You can imagine no worse consequence of 
sin than sinfulness, although there are other dire results 
that flow from it. The Universalist church says that man 
should not want to have it otherwise than that sin be 
surely and always punished, because we look upon punish- 
ment not as wholly retributive. It is also reformatory. 
If there were no severe consequences to sin, we might 
doubt if men would ever quit sinning. " For sin's so sweet, 
that minds ill-bent, rarely repent ; until they meet their 
punishment." The effects of sin help on the repentance 
and reclamation of the sinner. We know this. We see it 
every day. Therefore, we teach that there is a purpose 
in punishment ; it is not dictated by a revengeful nor 
sternly just God, but it cOmes from a loving Parent to 
admonish and reform a loved, though erring, child. Here 
is the true idea of the source and intention and result of 
punishment, fresh from the pen of the writer to the 
Hebrews — fresh I say, because for centuries it has not been 
promulgated from any " evangelical " pulpit and is therefore 
new to most people : — 



SALVATION 143 

" Whom the Lord loveth lie chastenetli. God dealeth with 
you as with sons. We had fathers of our flesh to chasten us, 
and we gave them reverence. They, verily, for a few days 
chastened us as seemed good to them ; but he for our profit, that 
we may be partakers of his holiness. All chastening seemeth 
for the present to be not joyous, but grievous : yet afterward it 
yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that are exercised thereby, 
even the fruit of righteousness." 

This is the only Christian and rational idea of punish- 
ment : punishment the chastisement of a good God, visited 
upon the sinner for his profit, that he may become holy as 
God is holy. It satisfies every normal mind to know that 
punishment is both inevitable and profitable. There is 
justice and mercy in such an arrangement : there is no 
justice and no mercy, truly speaking, in punishment that 
is purely retributive and endless ! What are we arguing 
for to-day with regard to criminals? We are arguing 
that they be punished for every crime they commit, 
whether they be rich or poor, but we are also demanding 
that the punishment be of a reformatory nature. We 
want our criminals to be so disciplined that they will 
come out of prison disposed and able to live upright. 
The demand of this age is for reformatories rather than 
for jails : disciplinary punishment rather than simple 
imprisonment. How far ahead in its sociolgy and penol- 
ogy Christendom is than in its theology ! How much 
better we are to entertain this idea ; yes, how much better 
the people of Maine are to have abolished capital punish- 
ment, than God is, if it be true that he punishes for the 
sake of punishing and even goes to the length of 
tormenting his victims forever rather than to mercifully 
annihilate them ! I suspect the humanity of this age, and 
particularly of the next, will effectually rid us of all these 



144 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

horrible and really blasphemous notions of God's purpose 
in punishment and the duration thereof. The doctrine of 
the future, as it is the Universalist doctrine to-day, will 
be that of Christ, who said : " Verily thou shalt not come 
out thence until thou hast paid the last farthing," — 
announcing the certainty and sufficiency of punishment, 
and of his Apostle who said : "Afterward it — chastisement 
— will yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them 
that are exercised thereby" — announcing the amendatory 
nature of punishment. 

What We Need to be Saved From. Now if 
we are not to be saved from a personal Devil, a wrathy 
God, nor the consequences of sin and folly, what do we 
stand in need of deliverance from? Just two things. 

(a). One of them is sin. The Bible is exactly right 
in teaching over and over again that man needs to be 
delivered from sin and should pray and strive for such 
deliverance. Sin is a fact. It is not an illusion nor a 
delusion, but a terrible reality. What is sin? It is con- 
scious disobedience of a moral law. If I steal, I sin. If I 
lie, I sin. If I think an impure or evil thought, I sin. 
I sin in these acts because I do what is neither 
according to the will of God nor good for society nor 
good for myself. Now, all men sin. Is there one here 
to-night who can say he never consciously violated a moral 
law? Not one. We all stand in need of salvation from 
sin. We need something to help us never to knowingly 
transgress the moral law. We not only need this salvation 
but there are times when we want it terribly. Have we 
never wrestled with sinful desires, as Paul wrestled ? Have 
we not said, as he did, " I delight in the law of God after 
the inward man ; but I see a different law in my members, 



SALVATION 145 

warring against the law of my mind. wretched man 
that I am, who shall deliver me out of the body of this 
death?"' Sin is one of the facts of human life that all 
men need to be saved from. 

(b). But is this all? Is sin the only thing we need 
to get rid of? "What of ignorance ? What of superstition ? 
What of intellectual and emotional weakness ? What of 
the imperfections characteristic of humanity? Do we not 
need deliverance here too ? Verily, we do. Rid us entirely 
of sin, and we are not by any means what we are to be. 
Take away from our minds and hearts all jealousy and 
envy and malice, every lust ; cleanse us, make us pure, 
whiter than snow, and we are by no means "full-grown 
men." We have made a splendid stride toward destiny, 
but the journey is by no means at an end. Not until 
man is symmetrical, mentally and emotionally, as well as 
morally, is he fully saved. Human incompleteness as 
well as human sinfulness has to be overcome before the 
race stands upright in the perfection and glory of God. 
Therefore, sin was not the occasion of salvation, as the 
creeds assume. If man had never sinned, he would still 
have needed to be saved, simply because he has been and 
is imperfect. He has not yet attained. He has ever been 
stretching toward the goal of a completed manhood. 

What Salvatiox Is. Salvation, then, is a larger 
word than it is commonly thought to be. It covers that 
process by which mankind is delivered out of all its 
evil and all its imperfections. " Salvation for man must 
be not only from his evil to his good but from all his evil 
to all his good." And the process in salvation is growtli 
in manhood and womanhood, or, in one word, growth in 
character. Calvin said: " Salvation by grace " ; Luther 

said : " Salvation by faith " ; Universalists say : " Salvation 

10 



146 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

by character." We point to Jesus Christ as the typical 
man, as the only man who has attained salvation in this 
world, and say that when other men are like him they are 
saved, and not before. So that when we are asked : "Is 
a righteous life necessary to salvation ? " we answer, as 
Lyman Abbott did : " We do not think a righteous life is 
necessary to salvation ; a righteous life, if by that is 
included character, is salvation ! " 

How We are Saved. Have I time to suggest how 
our salvation is to be accomplished? I must be brief. 
Here are the two things we are to be saved from : Sin 
and Imperfection. How are we to compass this great 
result? In the simplest of ways, namely: "By co-oper- 
ating with God." " God is our Saviour," says Paul, " and 
he wills that all men shall be saved," God has filled the 
world with uplifting influences, and it is man's duty to 
discern these helps to destiny and lay hold of them and 
work in harmony with them. The deliverance desired 
must be gradual, because character comes slowly, but it 
comes surely to those who want it and are willing to 
endeavor for it. 

We may rest assured that we can all attain a God-like 
character. There is a fine verse in the old prophet 
Micah. It reads: "If I am a father, where is my 
honor?" In that God is our Father, his honor is bound 
up in our future. He is in honor bound to see that his 
children attain their highest good. He is pledged to them 
on the score of his Fatherhood to furnish the means 
whereby they can triumph over sin and incompleteness. 
Therefore, we may be sure that God has not left himself 
without a witness in any land or any age. We may rely 
on it that his world is filled with agencies calculated to 
bear men on to blessedness. 



SALVATION 147 

Agencies ix Salvation. Think of some of them. 
Think of instinct, think of climate, think of nature * 
system of rewards and punishments, think of conscience. 
They are inviting and constraining men to sin no more ; 
to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. Think 
of the two strongest incentives to progress toward perfec- 
tion that God has planted in every human breast, — the 
desire for happiness and the thirst for holiness. 

Take this desire for happiness. How insatiable it is ! 
How universal ! How uplifting ! \Ve see its mighty part 
in the development of the race when we realize that it is 
the underlying cause of trade, commerce, invention, science, 
education, government, society and the home. 

\Vhv do men trade? To get those things which 
minister to their comfort. Why this vast and magnificent 
exchange of produce called commerce? That men may 
tret monev to buy those things which will make them, as 
they suppose, happier. Why all the inventions of this 
inventive age ? if not to reduce the wear and tear of life 
and lighten its burdens. Why all the progress and 
activities of science ? Is it merely for the sake of knowl- 
edge, or is it to bless humanity through the channels of 
medicine, surgery, and hygiene? Education is carried on 
in the faith that knowledge will relieve men of the follies 
and vices of ignorance. Government is the expression of 
the desire to avoid anarchy, turbulence, and war, and 
to secure and preserve peace with its sweet amenities. 
Society is the growth of the wish to live amicably with 
one's neighbors and to get the encouragement and cheer 

o e o 

which such intercourse brings. The home is a signal 
example of man's dream of felicity, and his honest and 
beautiful purpose to find it, if it can be found anywhere 
on earth. 



0OOD 

ought i'(>n\i ; 
men, themselves anii opines* 

themselves imbued --- it h the pui plea-<; and 

inspire their fellows. P j of faitfj 

peare, Wordsworth, Brcv .-.. and Whittier; 

it. ha- J 
has produced Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and R 
ton, Btrffira, Lmn&us and Cuvier, Darwin, Wall 

: and philosophy in it-, splendid endeavor to reveal 
the mind of the Inft added Plato and Aristotle; 

Kant and H' aiming to leenre die 

right* of the people and to establish dei ight 

forth Burke and Chatham; Washington and Jef f er s on and 
Lincoln. 

Arid who can measure die influence for good that these 
men hare had upon the development of die race? Who 
v. ill -;>-, that these men hi d no part in wiving the 

Id ? 'I o my mind, the poets, die authors, die seienti 
die philosophers, die statesmen have been instrumental 
under the ordination of God in helping hum* ard 

salvation. 

But a mightier factor in human redemption than the 
longing for happiness has been the thirst for holim 
If, has been felt by men everywhere. 8aj what we will 
about the depravity of human nature, if is too true to be 
denied that amidst all his wickedness -Hid beastliness, man 
ha i ihown a hunger and thirst for something better. Jn 
his lowest depths he has cried out for the i. i d. His 
heart has panted for the watei brooks of goodni 

This thirst i'<>r holiness, iik<: the desire for happh 
has manifested itself. If is seen in die religious institu- 
tions, and teachers, and examples of die world. Sacri- 



SALVATION 149 

fices, rituals, churches, precepts, prayers ; ;ill these are 
expressions of man's thirst for God and his righteousness. 
Religion has been well defined as "man's search for God/ 1 
And as tin- search has gone on — we note it- beginnings 
in the dim ristas of history — eers find prophets and 
Leaders have arisen, each one bringing to eager humanity 
a message from the unseen and yet everywhere-present 
God. And the fad thai the religious leaders of the race 
have always secured the first hearing, indicates thai man 
instinctively l'<-<-.\~ that his religious interests are more 
important than his secular and temporal concerns. There- 
fore, the religious teachers have led the wrorld whitherso- 
ever they Listed, and, under God's providence, their Lead- 
ings have been safe and upward. Certain men have seen 
more of God than their fellows, and have told of their 
insights. They became great Leaders. They have been 
eminent among the saviours of the race. Pre-eminent 
among them all is Jesus of Nazareth. 

Now, through innumerable agencies, and especially 
these two just dwelt upon — the desire for happiness and 
the thirst for holiness, and the men who have ministered 
to and intensified and refined these desire — it is clear that 
God has been intent on developing the race and bringing 
humanity to its predestined stature. God has done and is 
doing lii- part . 

But God is not doing it all, nor indeed can be, Man 
i- a free agent, and has something to say about the matter 
of lii- salvation, and something to do towards it. Hence, 
(j<>(\ waits for man to co-operate with him ; to exert his 
will power in becoming what he was destined to become 
and in helping others to the same dignity and glory of 
attainment . 

We are to work out our own salvation, even with fear 



150 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and trembling, knowing this, that it is God who worketh 
in us both to do and to will of his own good pleasure. 
What God demands of you and me in order that we may 
be perfected is that we obey all the promptings of and 
appeals to our better nature and "deal justly, love mercy, 
and walk humbly before him." Nothing supernatural 
about our part ! Nothing magical in our salvation ! 
If through sin we arc disunited from God, we must 
through repentance and obedience become united with him 
again. Since through natural incompleteness we are still 
.short of the glory of the final man, we must aspire and 
achieve until we attain that glory. 

Christ's Part jn Salvation. Do you ask what 
part Christ plays in this scheme of salvation? Let me 
illustrate the answer. 1 Every soldier recalls the battle of 
Cedar Creek. You remember that the Union troops 
defeated General Early at Winchester and Fisher's Hill, 
and camped at Cedar Creek during the night. Their 
General was at Winchester, little dreaming that the enemy 
would renew the battle. But under cover of a dense fog 
and the darkness of early morning, the enemy stole in 
upon the Union troops, and a terrible rout began. Sur- 
prised, dazed, without a leader, they were beaten back 
and back by the enemy, leaving the dead and wounded 
along the path of defeat. The ■ nag was furled and the 
artillery wheeled backward unloaded. Sheridan heard the 
cannonading from Winchester, and knowing the importance 
of his presence, he put spurs to his coal-black steed. As 
he passed the fugitives along the road, he shouted, "Turn, 
boys, turn, we're going back." All at once a sergeant, 
standing on an eminence, descried in the distance a dark 

1 Illustration suggested by Rev. Marion D. Shutter, D.D. 



SALVATION L5I 

object moving swiftly along the road. It was Sheridan 
and his war steed. The sergeant began to shout : "Sheri- 
dan is coming 1 Sheridan is coming!" Others caught his 
words as they sounded along theentire line: "Sheridanis 
coming!" Wha1 a change came over the repulsed and 
beaten army. The retreat was stopped. Every man 
turned right about and grasped his musket with a firmer 
hand. And when the intrepid General dashed among them 

he led them to a glorious triumph and retrieved the shat- 
tered fortunes of the day. Whatwroughl the transforma- 
tion? Faith, saving faith, in the military sense. Every 
man in that army believed in Phil. Sheridan ; believed in 
his generalship; believed in him as victory incarnate; and 
the soldierly qualities in Sheridan made a soldier of every 
man in the ranks. He saved them by the inspiration of his 

personality. So JeSUS Christ saves humanity '. at/ means 

of his personality and great assurances. He attracts 

men to him and holds them until they rout their adversa- 
ries. He came to men in his own day; men who were 

surprised by the forces of sin and iniquity and were; being 
rapidly worsted ; fleeing, many of them, they knew not 
whither. To the .Jews, the Romans, the (i reeks, Jesus 

came and cried : "Turn, brothers, turn ; follow me. I 
have Overcome the world!" He comes to men to-day; 
men who are sinful and wretched ; men who are being 
Steadily pushed back and Under by the treatment aeeorded 
them in this still semi-( 'hrist i;m age; and he erics : "In 
the world ye shall have tribulation, hot he of good cheer; 

I have overcome the world. Follow me." And to those 
who heai- his voiee and listen, he gives inspiring and saving 
assurances. Of God he says: "God is your father ; be 

is interested in yon ; he is your Saviour; and thus nivcs 
men what they need — hope in God." lie also says : " You 



152 GOOD SEH8E IH RELIGION 

are a child of God : an heir of perfection : you can become 
rod. knowing good and evil but choosing only the good. 
I exemplify the dignity and capacity of human nature : of 
your nature : of every human soul.'" And thus he gi 
men hope in themselves. Then he turn- to other men 
and says : " These also are children of God ; divine by 
nature : to be made divine in character. Appeal to them ; 
work with them ; your efforts will not be in vain." And 
man has hope in man. Thus, led by Christ's matchless and 
magnetic personality and ringing words, to hope in God. 
to hope in self, to hope in man. the race is following Jesus : 
lifted up, he is drawing all men unto his stature ; men 
are mounting inch by inch the hill of perfection, through 
personal endeavor after likeness to it. and we may be sure 
that they will stand at last on its summit-. 

"Where he leads, I'll follow, follow all the way." we 
sing. If we are true to our -ong ; if we follow Je 
ail the way — if we live his life of inward truthful r - 
and outward devotion to God and man, we shall leave our 
sinfulness and imperfections behind us forever and be at 
_rh as he was — at one with God. at one with -elf. at 
one with man — saved ! 



LECTURE VIII 
HELL 

• If I be a Father, where is mine honor? '" — Malachi i.. 6. 

A question that thoughtful persons might profitably 

ask concerning the momentous subject of the fate of the 
wicked, is this : "Why does any one doubt, and seek to 

get others to doubt, that the doom of the sinful is eternal 
punishment? What is the motive in such a denial r" 

Speaking for the Universalis! Church, it can be said 
that our motive for continuing an organized crusade 
against the dogma of unending punishment is three- 
fold : First, we want to see the truth prevail. Secondly, 
we love God and cannot stand passively by and hear a 
dor-trine preached which to »>ur mind blasphemes Iris holy 
name and impeaches his honor. Thirdly, we are laboring 
in the intere-t ot humanity by seeking to rid it of this idea 
which Calvin himself pronounced "horrible." and which is 
the cause of bad religious practices and expectations and 
the source of much acute suffering. AVe see a great deal 
of unnecessary and very cruel pain Buffered by those who 
believe or are taught to believe in everlasting torment for 
the wicked. 

A physician said: -*I have seen to-day the most pathetic 
thing that I have ever seen in the range of my professional life. 
I attended a little child, live or six years ot' age. delirious with 
fever. She was talking incoherently and I bent down to hear 
what she was saying. As I listeued I heard her saying, 
plaintive, piteous tones. 'God save me from hell."" 



154 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Children, little children, have trembled under the fear 
of eternal torment ; grown-up people have even been 
crazed by it. A mother in Newcastle killed herself in a 
fit of desperation caused by the thought that her only 
daughter who had died outside of the church had gone to 
hell. A widow called me into her home the other day 
and asked, with tears running down her cheeks, if there 
was any hope for her husband who had died and was not 
a church member. Her own pastor, a Methodist, had 
told her there was no hope for him. These are but hints 
of the untold and unseen pain caused by the doctrine of 
everlasting punishment. It shadows many a life that else 
would be brave and cheerful and useful. It is a heartless, 
cruel dogma ; and in the name of God and humanity the 
Universalist Church renounces it. It is time that a doctrine 
which throws little children into deliriums, that crazes 
mothers, and sends widows through long years with bleed- 
ing and hopeless hearts — it is time that such a fearful 
dogma were looked at fairly and squarely by every genuine 
lover of his race and given its true place, — among the 
pagan notions of a pagan past. These three motives, 
love of the truth, love of Grod, and love of man, explain 
why Universalists have felt it their duty to deny this pre- 
vailing doctrine of Christendom and to submit to the 
persecution in the form of ostracism and obloquy that it 
has been their lot to bear. 

Now, it should be more generally known than it seems 
to be, that Universalists believe in the absolute certainty 
of punishment. The lecture on Salvation shows con- 
clusively that we teach that the consequences of sin are 
inevitable. "Though hand joined in hand the wicked 
shall not go unpunished." The crusade of Universalism 
is not against the doctrine of retribution, but against the 



HELL 155 

dogma of endless punishment. Universalists rest their 
denial of unending torment on Biblical, Christian, and 
philosophical grounds. With the philosophical argument 
against everlasting punishment, I deal in the lecture on 
Annihilation. My present purpose is to show the Biblical 
and Christian reasons for disbelieving the dogma. 

© © 

A Change in Orthodoxy. It is evident that ortho- 
doxy has given up the old-fashioned idea of hell fire and 
brimstone as the abode of the wicked. According to the 
preaching of to-day, eternal punishment is to be mental 
and spiritual rather than material. This is a prophetic 
departure, and Universalists are pleased to find some of 
the "evangelical" clergymen giving the credit for it to 

© ©- © © 

whom it largely belongs. The late Rev. Frank Hinman, 

© © 

a Presbyterian, said: "Universalism lias done a good 
work for us all. It has eliminated forever the idea of a 
literal hell of fire and brimstone. It has re-emphasized 
the idea of the sublime love of God and taught orthodoxy 
a lesson in that the world was to be won more by an exhi- 
bition of love than by an exhibition of wrath. In many 

ways it is doing: a grand work for the world." "We are 
© © 

thankful for such appreciative words from so unexpected 
a source. We assure such kindly critics that we mean 
to go on in our grand work. Our mission in this direction 
is not ended : it can never end until the idea of unending 
punishment of any sort is abolished from Christendom. 
It is a relief to us that orthodoxy has given up the hell- 
fire aspect of future punishment, for we no longer need to 
explain texts which speak of punishment in or by fire. 
Such passages as, "The angels shall come forth and sever 
the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them 
into the furnace of fire:" and, "Depart from me, ye 
cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the 



156 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

devil and his angels," are being explained to-day by evan- 
gelicals as metaphorical. They are saying, what we have 
said for years, that they must be understood figuratively 
as expressing the severity of the punishment for sin and 
not literally as explaining the manner in which sinners are 
to be tormented. So far, so good. But can we not take 
a step farther? Can we not fairly say that the Bible not 
only does not teach endless punishment in fire, but that it 
does not teach endless punishment at all? Let us see. 

No Doctrine in the Old Testament. To every 
Bible student, it is plain that the Old Testament has no 
doctrine as to the fate of the good and the bad beyond the 
grave. Sheol is the word uniformly used in the Old 
Testament to designate the abode of all the dead. Sheol 
meant to the Jew what grave means to us — the place 
where the dead are buried. Those who gave us the old 
version of the Old Testament translated this word sheol, 
hell — a thing they were not justified in doing. The 
revised version of the Old Testament has changed the 
translation and substituted sheol for hell in every important 
place. Hence, instead of reading in Psalm ix., for 
instance, that "the wicked shall be turned into hell," we 
read that "the wicked shall return to sheol," that is, they 
shall die and be buried. In the earliest days, the Jews 
looked upon sheol as a place where the dead — good and 
bad — were in a perpetual, dreamless sleep. In later 
times, several centuries before the birth of Jesus, they 
began to think that the dead in sheol were dimly conscious, 
flitting about like shadows, and waiting to be resurrected. 
The resurrection, however, was to life on this earth. The 
good Jews were to come forth and be forever happy ; and 
the evil were to come forth, and be forever banished. 
That is the meaning of Daniel xii., 2 : "And many of 



HELL 157 

them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some 
to everlasting life, and some to everlasting contempt or 
abhorrence." The idea of hell and its torments, such as 
is familiar to us, never entered the heads of the Jews in 
Old Testament times. 

Professor Crawford H. Toy, of Harvard Divinity School, 
assures us that, "the conception of hell is not found in the 
Old Testament ; there is no local distinction in sheol between 
good and bad ; no apparatus of reward and punishment. The 
reward of the righteous is long life on earth (Prov. iii., 16) ; 
the punishment of the wicked is premature death (Prov. x., 27) . 
The first departure from the old conception of the future is 
found in the book of Daniel (xii., 2) in connection with the 
idea of resurrection ; of those Israelites who are raised to life, 
it is said, some will be happy and some wretched." 

It is, therefore, plain that the Old Testament throws 
no explicit light upon the fate of the good and bad in 
the other world. 

For information on this subject we must rely wholly 
upon the New Testament. And it is rather significant, 
that except in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke 
and the book called Revelations, almost nothing is said of 
hell in the Xew Testament. The book called Revelations 
has puzzled the best scholars. It is hardly understood 
to-day. I think Professor Toy has given us the substance 
of its teachings in these words : 

" Revelations pretends to give a complete sketch of the 
fortunes of the earthly kingdom of God. The main point of 
this sketch is the double judgment. The destruction of the 
Roman Empire is followed by the imprisonment of Satan for a 
thousand years and by the first judgment. Those who had 
been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and had not wor- 
shiped the beast — that is, had not acknowledged the religious 
authority of the Empire — are restored to life (the first resur- 



158 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

rection), and reign with Christ a thousand years. At the end 
of this millennium, Satan is loosed from prison, and advances 
at the head of the innumerable hosts of Gog and Magog to 
attack the camp of the saints and the beloved city. Fire 
descends from heaven and devours the anti-godly army ; the 
devil is cast into the lake of fire along with the beast and the 
false prophet (the political and religious enemies of the faith) , 
and there they are to be tormented forever and ever. There- 
upon follows the general judgment, where every man is judged 
according to his works, and whoever is not found written in 
the book of life — that is, is not a believer in Jesus — is cast 
into the lake of fire. Then the first heaven and the first earth 
pass away, a new heaven and a new earth come, God makes 
his dwelling with men, and from the eyes of his people all 
tears are wiped away. There is a city, a new Jerusalem, 
which shines with an everlasting divine light, and a life radiant 
with everlasting divine blessedness." "It is evident that the 
body of this description was taken from the books of Ezekiel, 
Isaiah, aud Enoch." "The details of the picture belong to 
the thought of the times. By the author and many others of 
that generation, doubtless, the fulfillment of the prediction was 
believed to be imminent." 

There are those who still wait for the fulfillment, but 
their number is small and decreasing. Christianity has 
practically given up the idea of Christ's coming in millennial 
splendor, just as it has given up the notion of a lake of 
fire into which the wicked were to be tormented forever. 
Hence, it is only necessary for me to make clear the mean- 
ing of Revelations to have it ruled out of the evidences 
bearing upon the question of the fate of the good and bad 
in the other world. It relates wholly to this world ; it 
predicted things that were to happen ages ago, some of 
which happened ; others of which did not . Revelations 
has had really little favor in the church in recent centuries. 



HELL 159 

Luther pronounced it, "neither apostolic nor prophetic;" 
and Zwingli said that it "was not a Biblical book ;" that it 
ought not to be in the Bible. 

The Biblical sources, then, of information as to the 
fate of the wicked beyond the grave are narrowed down to 
the Gospels, particularly the Synoptics, and the writings 
of Paul. 

The Teaching of Jesus. Every candid reader of 
the sayings of Jesus reported in the Synoptics, must admit 
that Jesus seems to have taught contradictory doctrines 
as to the outcome of life. One set of sayings attributed 
to him, seem to endorse the dogma of everlasting punish- 
ment ; another set seem to support the theory of universal 
salvation. For instance, we read that Jesus said: "The 
angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among 
the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire." 
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into eternal fire which is 
prepared for the devil and his angels." "And these shall 
go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into 
eternal life." He is also said to have uttered the parable 
of Dives and Lazarus, which seems to lift the curtain 
between this world and the next and shows us the condi- 
tion of the good and the bad over there. Now, passages 
like these, seem to prove that Jesus believed in hell fire 
and unending punishment. And if these were the only 
sayings of his on the subject, we might fairly conclude that 
he did believe in hell fire and endless torment. But we 
find him making such confident and optimistic declarations 
as these : "It is not the will of your heavenly Father that 
one of these little ones shall perish." "I beheld Satan 
fallen as lightning from heaven." "Be of good cheer, 
I have overcome the world." "And I, if I be lifted up 
from the earth, will draw all men unto me ;" a declaration 



160 GOOD SENSE IN EELIGION 

which Elizabeth Barrett Browning interpreted poetically 

thus : 

" So shall I lift up in my pierced hands, 
Beyond the reach of grief and guilt, 
The whole creation." 

Jesus also spake certain parables bearing on the out- 
come of human life. The parable of the lost sheep, pictures 
himself searching until the last lost one is found ; and the 
parable of the Prodigal Son represents the most abased 
child of God arising and entering again into loving fellow- 
ship with his heavenly Father ; and the parable of the 
Good Shepherd contains the great assertion that "there 
shall be one fold and one shepherd." Now, passages like 
these, seem to prove that Jesus believed in the efficacy of 
his life and teachings to save all men, and looked forward 
to universal salvation. And if these were the only sayings 
of his on the subject we would all agree that he was a 
Universalist. One thing is certain, no man durst say, 
in the face of the passages last quoted, that Jesus does 
not seem to teach the ultimate deliverance of all men 
from all evil. The question arises : How are we to under- 
stand Jesus ? Must we confess that his teaching on this 
point is contradictory ? or, must we take an agnostic posi- 
tion, as some are doing, and say we do not know what 
Jesus really did teach about the final fate of the wicked? 
Or, may we interpret his language in a way to make it 
consistent with one of the two doctrines under discussion ? 

Did Jesus Contradict Himself ? I do not believe 
Jesus contradicted himself, neither do I believe that his 
reported sayings give us no positive light on the fate of 
sinners, and I think all the words he actually spoke may 
be interpreted in line with the doctrine of universal salva- 
tion. Let me show why I think so. 



HELL 161 

I. 

Consider the character of Jesus and tell me if you 
feel that some of the fierce utterances attributed to him 
could have fallen from his lips, or that he could have 
believed that his God would punish his disobedient children 
forever. The character of Jesus is manifested to us both 
in his deeds and words. He went about doing good, 
principally to the poor, and sick, and sinful. We think 
of him as a gentle, patient, sympathetic, hopeful, compas- 
sionate man. He was most loving. 

" ' See how he loved! ' exclaimed the Jews 
As tender tears from Jesus fell." 

Do not our grateful hearts cherish this thought of a 
tender Jesus, and delight to dwell on it? Think also of 
gracious words he uttered : 

"Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee 
on thy right cheek turn to him the other also. Love your 
enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be 
the sons of your Father who is in heaven ; for he niaketh his 
sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the 
just and the unjust. For if ye love them only who love you, 
what reward have ye? Ye, therefore, shall be perfect as your 
Heavenly Father is perfect. What man is there of you who, 
if his son shall ask for a loaf, will give him a stone ? If ye, 
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, 
how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good 
things to them that ask him ! All things, therefore, whatso- 
ever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye 
also unto them." 

Now it is a fair question whether a man who taught 
and obeyed such sentiments as these, ever, in his heart 
of hearts, believed in endless woe for a single human soul, 
not to say anything about endless woe for myriads of souls. 
Some have contrasted certain sayings attributed to Jesus, 



162 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and have said they could not believe that the same man 
uttered both sets of words. "After making due allowance 
for changes in his methods and manner, from the sharpness 
of the opposition he encountered, the contrast is too violent 
between the beatitudes and the sentence to eternal doom 
to believe that both came from the same lips.'*' Observe 
the striking differences of temper : 

"Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." 
" Bind him hand and foot, and cast him out into outer dark- 
ness ; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth ! " 

"Resist not him that is evil." "The angels shall come 
forth and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall 
cast them into the furnace of fire ! " 

"For if ye love them only who love you, what reward 
have you?" "Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how shall 
ye escape the judgment of hell?" 

"Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, 
that ye may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven." 
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is 
prepared for the devil and his angels ! " 

I knew George W. Chilcls. I knew his reputation as 
a philanthropist. I knew how he loved men ; how he 
gave his money and himself to the poor, and delighted in 
such service. I have read his noble estimates of human 
nature and human possibility. Now suppose I should 
hear some one say that George W. Childs had, on several 
occasions, furiously upraided the poor, denouncing them 
as lazy and worthless, and had called upon the State to 
hang every one of them ; suppose I should hear such sen- 
timents and sayings attributed to that great, warm-hearted 
man, what would be my immediate and proper reply? 
Why, I would say such language never was spoken by 
George W. Childs ; it is utterly opposed to his character 



HELL 163 

and reputation ; some one has invented it and shamefully 
attributed it to him. My denial would be based upon the 
knowledge I had of "the perfect temper, the perfect 
refinement, the deep sympathy" of Mr. Childs. "How 
much more shall I say that the awful anathema, r Go, ye 
cursed, into eternal fire,' is inconsistent with the character 
of him who wept over Jerusalem, and prayed God to for- 
give even those who crucified him ! " 

Because my idea of Jesus, gained from the Gospels, 
is that of a man with a gentle and forgiving disposition, I 
find it hard to believe that he uttered the terrible words 
attributed to him, or that he thought and taught that the 
wicked would suffer endless misery. If he did utter those 
terrible sentences, then I believe that they must have 
meant something else to him and to those who heard them 
than they do to us in plain English. 

May it not be that a study of the original language 
will soften their effect and cause us to see that Jesus did 
not convey to his hearers what his words convey to us ? 
Search out the passages in which it is alleged that he 
teaches unending punishment. The chief text, of course, 
is in Matthew, where the judge is represented as saying, 
" And these shall go away into everlasting punishment but 
the righteous into life eternal." All controversy over this 
passage would cease at once if our evangelical brethren 
would admit what the context requires them to admit, 
that the "judgment" referred to here was to have taken 
place and did in substance take place within the life-time 
of many of those who heard Jesus speaking. Matthew 
Mark, and Luke report Jesus as saying : " Verily, I say 
unto you that this generation shall not pass, till all these 
things be fulfilled." The catastrophe that he was prophe- 
sying was the destruction of Jerusalem, and the separation 



164 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

of the sheep from the goats to which he referred was to 
occur after that calamity, while some standing before him 
were yet living. Looked at in this light, as it ought to 
be, the sentence of the judge had nothing to do with a 
general judgment in remote ages to come, and should no 
longer be quoted as supporting the theory of such a judg- 
ment and its sequel, — unending punishment. 

However, since it is insisted that the end of this world 
and a final judgment are here depicted, let us see if the 
sentence of the judge is equivalent to endless punishment 
or is simply indeterminate. Look at the language in its 
Greek form. The two words translated "everlasting pun- 
ishment" are, in Greek, "kolasin aionios," "aionios" being 
the adjective rendered "everlasting," and "kolasin" being 
the noun rendered "punishment." Now, "aionios" is 
from the noun "aion," which means "an age." Therefore, 
a literal translation of the Greek would be " age-lasting " 
or "age-long," and not everlasting or endless. In this 
translation we have the support of eminent scholars. 
Canon. Charles Kingsley of the Church of England said : 
"The word r aion' is never used in Scripture or anywhere 
else in the sense of endlessness. It always meant, both in 
Scripture and out, a period of time." So that, so far as the 
word "aionios" is concerned, the period of time is indefi- 
nite. To learn how long the period will continue we must 
determine the nature of the thing of which it is predicted. 
Prof. Moses Stuart, for many years an honored teacher in 
Andover Theological Seminary, says of "aionios:" "The 
different shades by which the word is rendered depend on 
the object with which ? aionios ' is associated." Now, in this 
case the object is "punishment." Therefore, to determine 
how long this punishment shall last, we must see what kind 
of punishment is referred to. And as we study the meaning 



HELL 165 

of the word "kolasin," translated "punishment," we find 
that it means disciplinary and not retributive punishment. 
"Kolasis" means to prune, correct, improve. The kind 
of punishment which tends to the improvement of the 
criminal is what the Greek philosophers called "kolasis,"or 
chastisement. Plato shows that the word has only that 
meaning. Aristotle says that "kolasis"is corrective, and 
has in view the good of the offender. This being the case, 
the punishment referred to by the judge must come to an 
end by having reformed the one punished, or by finding 
him incorrigible and giving him up. Of this last alterna- 
tive I shall deal in my next lecture. What we should 
now bear in mind is that our text should be translated 
thus : " And these shall go away into age-lasting disci- 
plinary punishment," or, "these shall go away into the 
disciplinary punishment of the age to come," that is, the 
post-Messianic age. This interpretation confirms our dec- 
laration that the judgment referred to happened long ago 
during the Messianic age. The sentence upon the wicked 
was an indeterminate sentence. When a boy is sent to 
the Elmira Reformatory, the length of his imprisonment 
is not stated ; he is sent there with the understanding that 
he shall remain until worthy to come out and live an 
upright life. A similar sentence is pronounced by the 
judge in this parable upon those who were not followers 
of Jesus in deed as well as in word. And this is all we 
can etymologically or exegetically make out of this oft- 
quoted text, when we admit, for the sake of the argu- 
ment, that a final judgment is described by Jesus. It 
teaches the certainty of punishment, but it does not say 
how long that punishment shall last, simply because the 
judge did not presume to know how long it would take 
to reform the sinners under condemnation ! 



166 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Now some one may say, "if 'aionios' applied to pun- 
ishment means age-lasting, and not endless, then ? aionios ' 
applied to life means age-lasting, and not endless : there- 
fore, this passage does not teach that the righteous are to 
receive as their reward, endless life." Such may be the 
case, but not necessarily so. It may be that the two 
words " eternal life " form a phrase with a special mean- 
ing. Let us recall the words of Prof. Stuart: "The 
different shades by which the word r aionios ' is rendered 
depend on the object with which r aionios' is associated." 
Here the object is life. Does "aionios life" mean "immor- 
tal life"? Or, is "aionios life" a certain kind of life? 
It is evidently, from the usage of Jesus, not a quantity 
but a quality of life. Jesus uses the phrase "aionios 
life" or "eternal life" in a special sense. He defines his 
meaning thus : " And this is eternal life, to know thee 
the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." 
Eternal life, then, is in knowing God. A quality or kind 
of life. Something different from immortal life or endless 
life. Eternal life is not necessarily future ; it may be 
had now. Jesus said: "He that believeth hath eternal 
life " ; a present possession to those who knew God 
as Jesus knew him. This being clear, the old argument 
that if this passage does not mean that the wicked are to 
be punished everlastingly, it does not mean that the 
righteous are to live forever, falls flat. The judge is 
neither referring to unending punishment or unending 
life. The life he speaks of may last forever, and it may 
not. Its duration depends on whether the soul is immortal 
and whether the soul that once has " eternal life " ever parts 
with it or not ; questions to be decided on other grounds 
than this text. 

This definition of eternal life as the quality acquired 



HELL 167 

by a soul that knows God, suggests what the punishment 
referred to by Jesus may be ; it may be and doubtless is 
the state of a soul that does not know God, either through 
ignorance of the true God or through rebellion against 
him. It was Jesus' mission to reveal the only true God, 
or reveal God truly, in order that men might have " eternal 
life " and cease suffering from not knowing or not loving- 
God. Jesus prayed and labored that men might become 
one with God as he and God were one. Jesus had "eternal 
life" in its fullness. Every soul in harmony with God as he 
was would have that life also. And that Jesus believed 
such harmony was possible and that it would come is to 
be inferred from his radiant declaration : "And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me ;" that 
is, unto his stature or into his oneness with God. Did 
Jesus look upon this life as the only scene of his savior- 
ship ? Did he think that the fate of all souls was deter- 
mined this side of the grave ? Not if he meant all men 
when he said he would draw all men unto him ; not if 
Peter understood aright when he said that Jesus after his 
crucifixion went to the spirits in prison and preached to 
them and delivered them ! 

The Parable of Dives and Lazarus. We pass 
over the passages that speak of "eternal fire" and "un- 
quenchable fire " because our evangelical brethren, as I have 
shown, concede that they are metaphorical expressions ; 
and because the fires pronounced eternal and unquenchable 
have gone out ages ago ! Gehenna is no more ; and the 
worm that dieth not has been dead a thousand years ! We 
pass over these utterances, with the remark that at most 
they express the severity of the punishment for sin and not 
its duration, and come to the parable of Dives and Lazarus, 



168 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION 

which is so often used to picture the condition of the 
redeemed and the lost in the beyond. In studying this 
parable we should notice that Dives is not in hell, but, 
according to the revised and accurate version, in hades or 
the under-world, and that Abraham and Lazarus are there 
too. What their final and permanent abode and state 
shall be, the parable does not say. 

Canon Charles Kingsley aptly and suggestively says : " The 
parable of Dives and Lazarus is the one instance in which our 
Lord professedly opens the secrets of the next world. He\ 
there represents Dives as still Abraham's child, under no 
despair, not cut off from Abraham's sympathy, and under direct 
moral training, of which you see the fruit. He is gradually 
weaned from the selfish desire of indulgence for himself to love 
and care for his brethren, a divine step forward in his life, 
which of itself proves him not to be lost. The impossibility of 
Lazarus getting to him, or vice versa, expresses plainly the 
great truth that, each being where he ought to be at that time, 
interchange of place (that is, of spiritual state) is impossible. 
But it says nothing against Dives rising out of his torment, 
when he has learned the lesson of it, and going where he ought 
to go." 

This is the exposition of that troublesome parable 
by one of the greatest scholars the Church of England 
ever produced. And, you see, it is quite in line with the 
thought that the punishment of the wicked in the life to 
come is disciplinary, and not merely retributive. A Catholic 
priest has Shrewdly observed that "Dives must learn to 
make his appeal, not to father Abraham, but to Abraham's 
Father, and then the gulf of separation will be quickly 
crossed." 

In the light of what we have so far learned, are we 
not prepared to believe that Jesus did not teach endless 



HELL 169 

punishment? indeed, are we not ready to say that the 
words hell and damnation should not appear in the Bible 
at all? Sheol, hades, gehenna and aionios are the Hebrew 
and Greek words that ought to be there ; and if they 
were, what would become of this dogma of endless misery? 
It would be relegated to the pagan notions of the pagan 



Canon Farrar, the great English divine, says : "I ask you 
where would be the popular teachings about hell if we calmly 
and deliberately erased from our English Bibles the three words, 
damnation, hell, and everlasting? Yet I say unhesitatingly ; 
I say, claiming the fullest right to speak with the authority of 
knowledge ; I say with the calmest and most unflinching sense 
of responsibility ; I say, standing here in the sight of God and 
my Saviour, and, it may be, of the angels and the spirits of 
the dead, that not one of these words ought to stand any longer 
in the English Bible." 

This earnest declaration of Canon Farrar, made before 
the Bible was revised, had its effect, for those words, with 
few minor exceptions, are ruled out of the revised version. 

The Teaching of Paul. The character of Jesus, 
and the teachings of Jesus, when interpreted according to 
their meaning in the original Greek, convince me that he 
did not believe in nor try to lead others to believe in end- 
less punishment as the fate of the wicked. And when I 
turn to Paul, I see that he understood Jesus as I do and 
as disbelievers in unending punishment do. Paul explicitly 
teaches that punishment is remedial. "No chastening 
seemeth for the present to be joyous, but afterwards it 
yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness." With pro- 
phetic vision he pictures the future : " Till we all attain 
unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of 
the fullness of Christ. Then cometh the end, when he, 



170 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Christ, shall deliver up the kingdom unto God, even the 
Father ; when he shall have abolished all rule and all 
authority and power, for he must reign until he has put all 
enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed 
is death. And when all things have been subjected unto 
him, then shall the son himself be subjected to him, that 
did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all." 
If we think Paul thought that in this final triumph of 
Christ there would be a single voice hushed in eternal 
death, we hear him saying: "For, as I live, saith the 
Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue give 
praise to God." There shall be no absent knees ! no 
silent tongues ! for every knee shall bow and every tongue 
give praise. Paul's shout, " O grave, where is thy victory," 
vents his sublime belief that, "as in Adam all die so in 
Christ shall all be made alive." He sees the time when 
the seed of woman, as was prophesied in Genesis, has 
triumphed over the seed of the serpent, and sin and its 
consequences are abolished forever. 

Thus we rise from a study of the Bible feeling that it 
does not teach endless misery ; that its trend is steadily 
the other way ; and we are astonished that we and others 
have so long thought that such a horrible doctrine was 
warranted by the teachings of Jesus and his Apostles. We 
now see why thoughtful and devout and hopeful Christians 
in all ages have held the doctrine of the final holiness and 
happiness of the whole family of God, and why men like 
Canon Farrar, Phillips Brooks, Lyman Abbott, heroically 
and forever broke with the dogma of endless punishment. 
I will quote Canon Farrar in a minute. I now give the 
words of Lyman Abbott. He says : 

"I have long since for myself repudiated as unbiblical and 
unchristian the old, horrible nightmare that some of God's 



HELL 171 

children will go on sinning and suffering forever ; that some- 
where in the corner of God's great universe there will be a little 
prison-house where malice and hate and cruelty and revenge 
and wickedness will be triumphant, and from which God and 
God's love will be forever barred out." 

Why does Lyman Abbott describe the dogma of end- 
less punishment as not only unbiblical but unchristian? 
Simply because it is inconsistent with the character and 
teachings of Christ as we have seen, and contrary to every 
Christian conception of God, as we shall see. 

II. 

Let me briefly give what I call the Christian argu- 
ments against endless misery. The Christian, as a direct 
and beautiful result of Christ's instruction and example, 
regards God as a Father, whose love of humanity is uni- 
versal and constant. 

1. A Fatherly-God, says the Christian, must have a 
merciful and forgiving disposition. The dogma of 
endless torment repudiates this claim, for if there be 
millions in hell in whose behalf God makes no slightest 
effort, he is not merciful or his mercy is not like your mercy 
or mine. To say that God's justice has consigned them 
to such a fate, is to travesty that too often travestied term, 
for no man could possibly commit in the longest earth-life 
enough sins to deserve endless misery. But suppose he 
could and suppose such a sentence were strictly just ; would 
it be merciful? Even granting that justice had first say, 
would not mercy mitigate the penalty ? 

The most that justice could do would be to pronounce 
a sentence of endless torment ; the least that mercy could 
do would be to arrest that sentence short of endlessness, 
and the most that mercy, especially the mercy of our 
heavenly Father, would do — who can tell? Why the 



172 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Christian can tell, because he knows that God is forgiving, 
and more so than any human judge or parent. There is 
not a sinner alive, according to the current theology, who 
cannot, even in his dying breath, receive full and complete 
pardon of God. If that be so, is it possible that this for- 
giveness is withheld those on the other side of the grave ? 
Is it conceivable that the heathen and unbaptized, infants 
awake in eternity to suffer forever ? Are there prayers 
that arise from hell which never touch the heart of God ? 
voices from that awful abode which beseech him in vain? 
That is what the doctrines of probation and endless pun- 
ishment mean. It is no wonder that such a scholar and 
Christian as Dr. Briggs calls out and says that the doctrine 
of probation and judgment at death has no warrant in the 
scriptures, and he might have added that it is not sustained 
by the best Christian consciousness. Hell paved with 
infants' bones not a span long ! They used to believe 
that; but who believes it to-day? Hell populated with 
the heathen who never had the gospel preached to them ! 
They used to believe that ; but who believes it to-day ? 
Repentant souls in hell whose prayers the All-Father will 
not hear nor heed ! Who in his heart of hearts believes 
that? The Christian mind revolts from such conceptions. 
The God who is humane and merciful and forgiving surely 
cannot endure the sight of innocent babes in interminable 
agonies ; of benighted pagans in unceasing torments ; of 
penitent sinners in endless misery ! 

2. Furthermore, the dogma of endless punishment is 
not consistent with the Christian idea that God is self- 
sacrificing. That, really, is the great revelation of God's 
character which Christ made to man. A Father, who not 
only watches and waits for the home-coming of his willful 
children, but one who goes forth in search of them, as a 



HELL 173 

shepherd goes forth to find his last lost sheep ; caring not 
for the briars and sharp rocks ; thinking nothing of his 
lacerated flesh and bleeding feet ; thinking only of the 
strayed sheep and yearning to take it in his arms and bear 
it joyfully back to the incomplete fold. That is the reve- 
lation of God's attitude toward sinful men which Christ 
has given Christendom. God a father who sacrifices for 
the sake of his children. But the dogma of endless pun- 
ishment says that such a revelation is a lie and declares in 
a loud voice that God is just and that his justice is inex- 
orable. There is no sacrifice on God's part if it be true 
that men go out from his presence never to be searched for 
until found ; never to be prayed over and plead with until 
penitent and saved ! 

3. But, gravest of all, the doctrine of endless pun- 
ishment libels the Christian idea of God as love. To-day, 
as never before, the pulpit of every sect dwells fondly and 
eloquently on this aspect of God's nature. Ex-President 
Robinson, of Brown University, speaking of the Baptist 
denomination, laments the fact that in the churches of his 
faith the preachers do not present God in the aspect of jus- 
tice and wrath as they did of old. He says : " They dwell 
upon his mercy and forgiveness. Now, the ever-recurring 
text is, God is love ! Justice and penalty are alluded to 
only in doubtful undertones, but his benevolence and love 
are dwelt on with never-tiring emphasis." This fact 
causes the good old doctor to complain and grieve. Thank 
God ! say I, that such a change has come about. Thank 
God ! for the words of another orthodox scholar, this time 
the Rev. Dr. Briggs, who, far from lamenting the change, 
grandly says : 

"The conception of God as love, rather than as just and 
wrathful, may destroy our logic, our syllogism, our systems 



174 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and our methods. But the love of God to the world is more 
important than all the systems ever devised by men. It will 
shine forever as the central sun of the universe, when all the 
creeds and theologies have been buried in the oblivion of the 
eternities. It will go on through the centuries of the world, 
darting its heavenly light, its beams of divine fire, and its 
regenerating and transforming movements, until the world 
knows that God loves the world, and the world adores him with 
loving worship." 

And as this consummation comes to pass, signs of 
which are everywhere seen, think you that the dogma of 
endless punishment will be longer believed ? As surely as 
men come to regard God as love, and to believe it truly 
and understand its import and the sweep of its gracious 
meaning, that surely must and will they deny the doctrine 
of endless punishment and reject it with horror. 

They will say, with John Foster, "I acknowledge my 
inability (I would say it reverently) to admit this belief 
in endless punishment together with a belief in the divine 
goodness, — the belief that God is love, that his tender 
mercies are over all his works." 

Write over this pulpit : "God our father, — humane, 
merciful, forgiving, self-sacrificing, and loving ; " and then 
add : " He condemns his disobedient children to endless 
misery." Write there those words, and let him believe 
them who can. I cannot. They violate every concep- 
tion I have of God. They stab my heart. 

And where is the Christian heart that the dogma of 
endless misery does not stab? I have met men who, 
intellectually, because they thought the Bible taught it or 
because their logic necessitated it, accepted the doctrine of 
endless punishment ; but I have yet to meet the person 
who will confess that the idea is thoroughly agreeable to 



HELL 175 

his heart. The affections of the best hearts are all against 
the doctrine. And it is useless to tell a mother that she 
can be happy in heaven, knowing as she must know, that 
the sinful child she was instrumental in bringing into the 
world is in endless misery. There can be no heaven for 
her, nor indeed for anybody, so long as there is a hell and 
endless torment for somebody else. Mr. Moody told a story 
in my hearing, of a mother whose son was very wicked. 
He committed crime after crime, and she followed him 
from place to place, getting him pardon after pardon. 
Finally, he committed murder. She could not save him. 
He was hanged, but she begged his body that she might 
bury it decently. One day they found her form stretched 
across the mound above his grave, and in her pocket a 
request that she might be buried beside her boy. She had 
died of a broken heart. Mr. Moody said, great as was 
the love of that mother for a wicked son, greater was the 
love of God for his sinful children. And as I listened, 
two thoughts came in my mind. Would a God whose 
love was greater than that mother's be less faithful unto 
the end than she? And could that loving mother be 
happy in heaven knowing that her boy, over whom she 
had wept and for whom she had sacrificed and beside 
whom she had asked to be buried, was consigned to end- 
less torment ? And my heart said no ! to both questions. 
God, whose mercy endures forever, would not forsake one 
of his children, and that mother's heart would never be 
satisfied until her prayers and tears had saved her boy. 

There is no doubt that the Christian heart revolts from 
the idea of endless punishment. There are many Christians 
who have said and to-day say, with Canon Farrar : 

" I here declare, and call God to witness, that if the popular 
doctrine of hell be true I should be ready to resign all hope, 



176 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

not only of a shortened but of any immortality, if thereby I 
could save, not millions, but one single human soul from what 
fear and superstition and ignorance and inveterate hate and 
slavish letter worship had dreamed and taught of hell. I call 
God to witness that so far from regarding the possible loss of 
some billions of aeons of bliss, I would here and now, kneeling 
on my knees, ask him that I might die as the beasts that perish 
and forever cease to be, rather than that my worst enemy 
should enter the hell described by Tertullian, or Minucius 
Felix, or Jonathan Edwards, or Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Furness, 
or Mr. Moody, or Mr. Spurgeon, for one single year. Unless 
my whole nature were utterly changed, I can imagine no 
immortality which would not be abhorrent to me if it were 
accompanied with the knowledge that millions and millions of 
poor, suffering wretches, some of whom on earth I had known 
and loved, were writhing in an agony without end and hope." 

But, dear reader, the doctrine of endless torment is 
not true. The Bible does not teach it ; the best Christian 
ideas are all against it ; the finest Christian hearts cannot 
entertain it. It is, as Lyman Abbott says, an " old, horrible 
nightmare," and humanity is waking from its bad dream, 
and will by and by be entirely awake. And then all men 
will sing with Oliver Wendell Holmes : 

" While in my simple gospel creed 
That ' God is love ' so plain I read, 
Shall dreams of heathen birth affright 
My pathway through the coming night ? 
Ah, Lord of life, though specters pale 
Fill with their threats the shadowy vale, 
With thee my faltering steps to aid, 
How can I dare to be afraid ? 

Is there a world of blank despair, 
And dwells the omnipresent there ? 
Does he behold, with smile serene, 
The shows of that unending scene 



HELL 177 



Where sleepless, hopeless anguish lies, 
And ever dying, never dies ? 
Say, does He hear the sufferer's groan? 
And is that child of wrath His own ? 

O mortal, wavering in thy trust, 
Lift thy pale forehead from the dust! 
The mists that cloud thy darkened eyes 
Fade e'er they reach the o'erarching skies! 
When the blind heralds of despair 
Would bid thee doubt a Father's care, 
Look up from earth and read above 
On heaven's blue tablet, God is Love ! " 



12 



LECTUKE IX 

ANNIHILATION 

" I take great comfort in God. I think that he ... . would not 
let us get at the match-box so carelessly as he does unless he knew that 
the frame of his universe was tire-proof." — J. R. Lowell. 

In the lecture on Hell it was shown, conclusively I 
think, that the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek 
languages does not teach unending punishment. It justi- 
fies an expectation of future punishment, but necessitates 
our believing that future punishment, being remedial and 
reformatory, like the chastisement of God in this world, 
will come to an end. It was argued that the trend of the 
Bible, the character and power of Jesus Christ and the 
nature and purpose of God all lead to the conviction that 
when the punishment for sin has ended it will have 
reformed all sinners, and, together with other salutary 
influences, will have made the family circle of the 
Heavenly Father complete and holy and happy forever- 
more. 

I would have left this subject of the ultimate fate of 
the wicked with the discussion in the previous lecture had 
I not desired to examine in your presence certain argu- 
ments, not especially drawn from the Bible, although in 
some particulars re-enforced by its language, which are 
being used to disprove or at least to cast a doubt upon 
Universal Salvation. These arguments come endorsed b} r 
one or two great names and are therefore likely to 
seem plausible and to trouble the thoughtful person who, 
though he may feel that the Bible does not teach endless 



ANNIHILATION 179 

torment, may yet be loath to embrace Universalism because 
of these seemingly psychological and philosophical objec- 
tions to it. I will bring the theories before you, one by 
one, and criticise them as fairly and as fully as our time 
will permit. They all come under the general theory of 
Annihilation — the doctrine that sin leads to the utter 
extinction or blotting out of the sinner. To annihilate 
means to reduce to nothing or non-existence. Sin, it is 
argued, Avill sooner or later destroy the very existence of 
the sinner. 

"Permanency or Fixedness of Character." 
Before taking up the several theories of how sin tends to 
such a frightful issue, we will do well to consider quite an 
opposite, but equally terrible doctrine, namely: "Sin, 
instead of destroying the sinner, tends to so fix him in the 
habit of sinning that he must sin forever and therefore 
suffer eternally." This is the theory of the permanency of 
a sinful character. According to the teachers of this 
doctrine, this present life determines destiny. They argue 
that the habit of sinning may become so powerful this side 
of the grave that it cannot be broken up in the world to 
come. They also argue that no attempt will be made in 
the next life to save sinners. An impenitent sinner at 
death must and will remain an impenitent sinner end- 
lessly. Lost this side of the grave : lost forever ! The 
Rev. Joseph Cook is the most noted exponent of this idea. 
It is a doctrine quite widely preached in " Evangelical " 
churches. 

Of course it is built on the dogma that this life is a 
probed ion ari/ state. Show that the dogma of probation 
is untrue, and the advocates of the idea that life here 
determines destiny there, are all at sea, for if it be that a 
sinner may be converted after death there is no sufficient 



180 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

reason for arguing that an impenitent sinner in this world 
must continue an impenitent sinner in that ; for it is quite 
as impossible for any one to say that a sinful character 
over there will remain sinful perpetually as it is to predict 
that a person with a sinful character here in our midst will 
continue sinful until death. We have seen some of the 
very vilest of sinners converted in this life : why not expect 
to see like transformations in the life to come ? 

The necessary thing to do, then, is to show that pro- 
bation is not taught in the Bible nor sanctioned by Good 
Sense. The simple fact is, the word "probation" is 
nowhere to be found in the Bible. In one place, Jesus 
says : " Except ye repent, ye shall all in like manner 
perish," but this statement does not limit the time of 
repentance to this life. Nothing is said as to when one 
must repent in order to save himself from perishing. Prof. 
Charles A. Briggs says that the Scriptures do not teach 
judgment at death ; that there must be a chance in the 
other world, especially for infants and the heathen. And 
The Outlook, an able and candid and fearless Evangel- 
ical weekly, not long ago declared that, 

"The doctrine that Christ's redemptive work ends for every 
man at death, or, in more popular phraseology, that there is no 
probation after death, is a dangerous heresy." It further pro- 
claimed the dogma to be unscriptural and backed up its bold 
assertion by such references as these : ' ' The Old Testament 
writers projected the divine mercy into the next world. ' For 
his mercy endureth forever ' was the refrain of one of their 
Temple psalms. In the New Testament, when Christ foretells 
the founding of his Church, he declares that the gates of hell — 
that is, hades — shall not prevail against it. How Christ 
achieves his triumph for his Church, Peter declares : He enters 
into the under world to proclaim his Gospel to the imprisoned 
spirits. What this triumph imports, Paul declares : ' The 



ANNIHILATION 181 

Christ shall reconcile all things unto himself, whether things in 
earth or things in heaven, that is, in the spiritual and eternal 
world ; and in his name every knee shall bow, of those in 
heaven, and those in earth, and those in the under world. 
How complete this triumph shall be, the Apocalypse intimates : 
Death and Hades are themselves cast into the fire, the second 
death — that is, utter and irredeemable destruction. This is, 
in briefest possible compass, the Scriptural statement of that 
faith which has found expression in the oldest, most revered, 
most universally accepted creed of Christendom — the Apostles' 
Creed — ' He descended into hell ' — the place of departed 
spirits. The Christ carries his message and works his work 
of love there also." 

Not only is probation unfounded in the Bible, but it is 
not sanctioned by Good Sense. Where are we? In our 
Father's house ! This is one of his many mansions. We 
are members of his family. Dr. Munger reminds us that 

" Probation may be involved in the idea of a family, but it 
is not the spirit or end of it ; it is simply incidental. The 
father indeed educates his children for future use and responsi- 
bility ; but only in some indirect sense are they under proba- 
tion : they are not reared in an atmosphere of ' chance,' even 
though fair, or of an overhanging doom to be averted, but are 
children in the Father's house, reared in hope and love and 
freedom." 

" Certainly no education can go on without trial, but we are 
tried that we may be educated, and not educated that we may 
be tried. The essential characteristic of a Father's love is 
that it is inextinguishable. If I am here simply on trial, if I 
regard God as One Who is keeping a debtor and creditor 
account with me, I may in word call him Father, and in word 
ascribe love to Him, but I cannot regard Him as Father." The 
reasonable and Christian view of the situation is ' ' that we are 
not in the world to be tested, but to be trained under God's 
lessons." And, as Dean Stanley said, " In the transformation 



182 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

of opinion which is imperceptibly affecting all our conceptions of 
the future state, and in the perplexities and doubts which this 
transformation excites, the idea that comes with the most solid 
force and abiding comfort to the foreground is the belief that 
the whole of our human existence is an education — not merely, 
as Bishop Butler said, a probation for the future, but an educa- 
tion which shall reach into the future." 

Having thus shown that we have reason to give up the 
dogma that this life is simply probationary and to vie^v 
our present experiences as preparatory to and preparing 
us for experiences to come, let us ask if it is credible that 
a habit of sinning acquired in this life could compel us to 
mi forever. Think of it : a habit of sinning acquired in 
this world compelling one to sin forever and ever ! 

Hon. P. T. Barnum once remarked : 

" The force of habit is indeed strong, but to say that three- 
score years and ten give a character momentum for eternity, is 
about like saying that a child's toy pistol gives a Krupp gun 
projectile momentum to go around the world a million times !" 

But let us exchange rhetoric for logic. Here is the 
final and sufficient answer to the argument that character 
can ever become fixed either for good or for bad. Char- 
acter can never become fixed. Neither in this world nor 
in any other can it be said of a good or a bad character 
that it is permanent : that it cannot be altered. Consider. 
In order to have what we call character, we must have 
liberty. A person must be able to choose between good 
and evil or else he cannot be good or bad, morally 
speaking. Do you not see that " liberty " and " final " 
condition are incompatible, for he who can choose can 
never get himself into a fixed or permanent state, even if 
he were to choose to do so ! The power of choice would 
imply the power to get out of it. Therefore final impen- 



ANNIHILATION 183 

itence is an unpsychological fiction. And the phrase, 
" permanency or fixedness of character " is a contradiction 
of terms. Analyze the situation and see if this is not so. 
Dr. Orello Cone, in his monograph on Salvation, makes so 
fine an analysis that I will quote his words : "A man, it is 
said, may become fixed in a habit of sinning, so that he cannot 
do otherwise than sin — that is, cannot choose virtue. But he 
who cannot choose virtue cannot choose sin. To him who can 
do but one thing there is no choice ; and where there is no 
choice there can be no sin, since sin is the choice of wrong 
when right might have been chosen. On this theory, then, a 
man may exercise and develop his power to sin to such a degree 
that he is no longer able to sin at all ! The doctrine leads to 
an equal absurdity on the side of virtue. It involves a con- 
tradiction to say that a man may become fixed in doing right in 
the sense that he cannot do wrong. For to do right in the 
ethical sense implies a choice of right, and there is no choice 
of right to him who cannot choose wrong, since in a choice 
there must be two possibilities. He, then, who cannot do 
wrong is not a moral being, and cannot do right. Accordingly 
the phrase "permanency of character" is a contradiction. A 
permanent character would be no character at all, since charac- 
ter involves freedom of choice." 

Xow thoughtful people must see, and indeed are seeing, 
the absurdity of the argument for endless sin or perma- 
nent sinfulness on the ground that character can become 
fixed in evil here or in the beyond, and they are aban- 
doning the idea. 

Really, the only alternative to Universal Salvation is 
Annihilation. Endless torment and endless sin are neither 
possible in the nature of things, nor reconcilable with the 
Christian idea of God. Annihilation of obdurate sinners 
is a more merciful and a more plausible doctrine than any 
other, save that of Universal Salvation. If I could not 



184 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

believe in the salvation of all souls, I would believe in the 
utter destruction of incorrigibles. But as I can believe, 
with reasons, in the final holiness and happiness of the 
whole family of mankind, I gladly do so. 

1. Doctrine of Conditional Immortality. 
However, let us see on what grounds certain persons 
argue for annihilation. Those who hold the theory of 
conditional immortality, teach that immortal life is con- 
ditional ; that it is not a natural gift made to all men, but 
a prize and reward of virtue. Immortality is therefore 
conditioned on virtue. The more virtuous a man is, the 
longer he will live; the less virtuous, the sooner he will 
perish. The advocates of this theory do not say that all 
souls will not survive death : they do not fix any moment 
or epoch in which an unvirtuous or wicked soul ceases to 
exist. They say that while all men may survive the 
grave, it does not follow that all men will live forever and 
ever. They teach that only such souls as acquire (and 
keep ?) the life that was in Jesus Christ will exist perpetu- 
ally. They teach that Jesus came to give men immortality. 

Now there are just two things to be said to this rather 
complicated theory. First, its advocates do not interpret 
Christ's mission truly. Jesus said that he came that men 
might have life and have it more abundantly, but what 
did he say the life he brought was ? He called it " eternal 
life," not immortal life ; and, he defined his meaning quite 
explicitly by saying : "And this is eternal life, to know thee 
the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent," 
evidently a quality of life rather than a duration of life ; 
evidently something different from immortal life. 1 Jesus 
assumed that men were immortal. He told the Jews 
that God was not God of the dead but of the living, for 

!Seep. 166. 



ANNIHILATION 185 

all lived unto him. He was surprised that they could 
believe any other doctrine. But Jesus did not assume 
that all men had this peculiar quality of life which he 
called ff aionion " or " eternal," and he made it his mission to 
help men acquire it, even in this world. Therefore, I say, 
those who teach that Jesus came to give men immortality 
misinterpret his mission. Our immortality, brethren, as 
I shall show in a coming lecture, is derived from our son- 
ship to God : it is not dependent on a belief or an 
acquisition ; it is, if you please, a free gift of God, but 
it is given to every soul by reason of its origin, and not 
by virtue of its knowledge of Jesus Christ or its personal 
goodness. 

The other criticism that I would make of the theory 
of Conditional Immortality from a Universalist standpoint 
is, that it would not affect our position even if it were 
Scriptural and philosophical, because we would still reply 
that God through Christ and other agencies would see to 
it that every soul became immortal. 1 

2. Annihilation by Degeneracy. A much 
stronger case is made against Universalism by those who, 
admitting that the soul is naturally immortal and can 
never be obliterated, maintain that its possessor may lose 
his personality or cease to exist as a person, through per- 
sistent sinning. The advocates of this theory hold that 
sin, persisted in, instead of begetting a permanent sinful 
character, destroys character altogether, and wipes the 
sinner out of existence. Man, they say, by constant 
sinning may eventually lose his will power and his con- 

!The doctrine assumes that immortality is the supreme desire and 
supreme good of souls — a half truth. Souls desire to live on that they 
may attain blessedness. That is what Christ offers under the name of 
"eternal (or 'aionion') life." 



186 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

science and therefore cease to be a man! His soul, being 
immortal, will live on, but no longer with a person 
attached to it. It will become a thing, with the fate of 
things. This is the theory of the annihilation of the will 
and conscience by sin, and the transfer of the sinner from 
the category of responsible and enduring persons to the 
category of irresponsible and perishable monads. 

Metaphysically this doctrine has much in its favor. 
It is a plausible theory, and has received considerable 
importance from having been advocated by a man like 
Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge and apparently taught by a 
philosopher like Dr. James Martineau. Dr. Martineau, 
however, does not dwell upon this fate of the persistently 
wicked. He mentions it as a possibility in just one 
paragraph in his " Study of Religion," 1 where he is dealing 
with another matter. He is showing that Grod has made 
provision for the final extinction of moral evil or sin. He 
describes two ways in which this destruction is provided 
for in the nature of things. On the one hand, it is pro- 
vided for by the tendency which virtue has of increasing 
its possessor's power to continue virtuous ; and on the 
other hand, by the tendency which sin has to destroy the 
moral nature of the sinner and prevent him from sinning 
in an ethical sense. Dr. Martineau says that sin weakens 
will power until it is finally lost altogether and man sinks 
back among the animals and automatons. He is no longer 
a man, and is therefore irresponsible and therefore no 
longer sinful. Dr. Martineau says : 

"Thus neglect and misuse entail an eternal dying away of 
will, till the possibility of self-determination practically van- 
ishes, the moral life is to all intents and purposes expunged, 
and the human constitution reverts to the simply zoological.'' 

1 Vol. 2, p. 107. Compare with p. 348, Vol. 1. 



ANNIHILATION 187 

And in view of this possibility, Dr. Martineau sees how 
moral evil or sin may wholly disappear from the universe. 

Xow, the theory of annihilation through degeneracy 
or devolution is a plausible and formidable theory. It 
certainly has much to support it in experience. We know 
that vice and sin weaken the power of the will to resist 
temptation. We see men who sink so low that they are 
like beasts, and seem to await a brute's fate. Admitting 
these facts, it is, however, a fair question to ask if will 
power is ever utterly lost : if a human being can sink so 
low as never to rise again? Is anybody too bad to be 
salvable ? 

It is quite clear that we cannot say what may or can 
happen in the next life, simply because we have not been 
there to find out. We may believe that influences at 
work in this life are also operative there, and therefore 
deduce certain legitimate conclusions. However, in this 
matter, it is best to confine our inquiry to this life, and to 
see if we are warranted by psychology and experience in 
holding that sin can reduce a human being to the level of a 
monad or animal and thereby destroy him. 

And I apprehend that we shall see that the fatal 
objection to this theory is that it is not psychological as it 
professes to be. In saying that sin can destroy the will, 
it affirms that an acquired habit can extirpate an inborn 
and essential faculty of the mind, — a decidedly unpsy etio- 
logical conclusion ! A primary faculty cannot be destroyed 
by a secondary faculty or a habit. The primary nature 
of a man may be weakened and obscured, but being a 
primary and fundamental part of his being, it cannot give 
way to that which is second nature and therefore superficial. 

I lay down this proposition, then, that the will cannot 
be destroyed by sin. I acknowledge that its power can be 



188 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

weakened and greatly reduced, but I affirm that it can 
never be utterly and irrevocably prostrated or extirpated. 

I want to back up this assertion by several quotations 
from able psychologists. 

Professor William G. Tousey, of Tufts Divinity School, 
says : "I can find no psychological evidence that disuse even 
actually extirpates or that it even tends to extirpate a faculty. 
Disuse certainly weakens memory ; weakens affection ; weak- 
ens will ; but never, so far as I can see, uproots the faculty or 
directly assails its general centre." 

Professor John Grote, whose " Explo ratio Philosophica " is 
known to students as a store-house of the most profound studies 
in mental science, says : " Habits of mind are analogous to 
those of the body ; a habit may be called second nature in 
both, but there is a considerable difference between the two 
according to the nature of that of which they are habits. 
Habits of body take their place in the material organization, 
which so far as it is matter is out of ourselves and beyond our 
will, and permanent states or confirmations are establfshed 
which no power of will can remedy. Habits of mind are 
always mixed with a certain degree of estimation, judgment, 
opinion, which is in its nature alterable and as such may lead 
to alteration of the habits. When, therefore, habits of the 
mind are considered to constitute a second nature, it must be 
considered also that mental nature can never be accounted as 
immovably and irremediably fixed, but, with reason, being 
always capable of adding fresh knowledge and feeling, being 
susceptible of fresh impressions , the greatest changes can be 
produced in the nature and character without destroying indi- 
viduality." 

Professor Sedgwick, speaking of the influence of habits of 
evil, says : " I recognize that each concession to a vicious desire 
makes the difficulty of resisting it greater when the desire 
occurs, but the difficulty always seems to remain separated by 
an impassable gulf from impossibility." 



ANNIHILATION 189 

Now, having laid down the proposition that the will 
cannot be utterly destroyed by sin, and having quoted 
these able psychologists to support me in my position, 
what else remains to be done, save to turn to life as we 
observe it, and see if we have evidence of greatly weakened 
will power being restored and made dominant again over 
sinful tendencies and habits. 

The man who would say that he has discovered cases 
where the will power was utterly lost, would transcend 
the limits of knowledge, for, as I have said, no one knows 
what can be accomplished in the other life. 

And he would be a rash man who would say that even 
in this life there is any case of depravity utterly beyond 
recovery. Who has not known or read of men and 
women who have gone as low as low could be, being 
recovered and ultimately rendered virtuous? What is 
possible in one or more cases, surely is possible in others. 
The will is there, however weak it may be, and the right 
influences when brought to bear, strengthen it, and give it 
its intended and splendid supremacy. 

Take physical habits which have such control over the 
will. Take drunkenness. It is a disease. It becomes a 
mania. We know that the drunkard is actually compelled 
to drink. His appetite will not be refused. Now,, until 
certain remedies were discovered, almost everybody was 
ready to say that a confirmed drunkard was a hopeless case. 
But what are Ave saying to-day? We are saying, and 
others are showing, that the worst cases of drunkenness 
can be cured. The Keeley Cure is a Godsend. When 
Mr. Keeley first proclaimed its virtues, a certain Chicago 
editor doubted him. Mr. Keeley said: "Pick me out 
four of the very worst drunkards you can find in Chicago, 
and if I do not cure them, you may publish me and my 



190 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

remedy as fraudulent." The editor got four of the vilest 
inebriates Chicago could furnish ; he sent them to the 
Institute ; and in about four weeks, Mr. Keeley sent them 
back to him, new men. They had no appetite for liquor, 
and they felt that they could live sober lives and they said 
they meant to, and they did. Now what does the Keeley 
Cure and the Bi-Chloride of Gold cure for drunkenness 
demonstrate ? They prove that the will is not extirpated 
by vice. Given the proper assistance or opportunity and 
the will once more assumes its beautiful sway. 

But it is not necessary for medical science to step in 
to recover fearfully depraved men. There are other 
influences at work in God's world which accomplish saving 
results. Read the life of John B. Gough and you will 
see how a swinish drunkard was reclaimed by faith and 
love. Or let me tell you a part of the life of Michael 
Dunn. He was brought up to steal. He inherited theft 
and was trained to it. "I was trained regularly to steal," 
he said. "Me an' me gran'mother, an' me aunt, an' me 
mother, every one of us was in together for thievin' and 
it came nateral as breathen'." He was sent to jail five 
times before he was in his teens. He spent thirty-five 
years in prison ; and fifty-three years in criminal life— his 
hand against every man and every man's hand against 
him. Sent from England to Australia ; shipped from 
Gibraltar with a free pass to America ; passed along from 
one community to another — anything to get rid of him, he 
was so desperate a criminal. 

Now, if Michael Dunn had died at that time, and we 
had asked the believers in endless sin as to his fate, they 
would have said that throughout eternity he would 
continue a sinner, without possibility of reformation. If 
we had asked some of the prison officials their opinion of 



ANNIHILATION 191 

Michael Dunn they would have pronounced him incorri- 
gible. Fifty-three years of crime had seemingly placed 
him beyond all power of self-recovery and beyond every 
other reformatory influence. But developments would 
have discredited both theories. And I deem it right to 
ask if in this world the very worst men are frequently 
saved, what is to prevent similar recovery in the world to 
come ? 

One day, so the story is told in "Darkness and Day- 
light in New York," Michael Dunn drops into Jerry 
McAuley's and Jerry tells him that he can be an honest 
and a happy man if he will. "I looked at him kind o' dazed 
like," says Michael. " Me — honest and happy ! Me — that 
never had home or aught but from hand to mouth in the 
few months I'd be out ? " But Jerry McAuley's kind and 
trustful word had its effect. His prophecy came true. 
Michael Dunn, in spite of his long career of crime, took 
the last step, and then turned round and lived a life con- 
secrated to the service of humanity ! The old jail-bird 
became a saint. He built Industrial Homes in New York, 
Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn; 
and to-day, hundreds, with tearful eyes, bless him for the 
hope he has put into their lives and the opportunities to 
noble living which he has given them. 

If a man after fifty-three years of sin , can so quickly 
and radically recover his lost manhood and live such a 
noble life, who dares say that a man at any age or in any 
world is utterly beyond recovery ? 

I am prepared to go to the extent of saying that it is 
not only possible for the vilest man to repent and be saved, 
but that it is a thing provided for and necessitated by the 
very nature of sin and the safeguards of man's nature and 
environment. 



192 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

"Virtue is according to nature and vice against it. Evil 
is everywhere a condition of intrinsic disquietude and unstable 
equilibrium. In each soul there are moral forces, forces 
which so far from being extirpated from a course in evil 
indulgence steadily persist and secretly develop higher tension, 
as it were, and a kind of irritability and volcanic power, which 
at length is liable on the most trivial provocation to manifest 
itself in sudden explosion and moral revolution." 

The story of the prodigal son, while dealing with an 
imaginary character, nevertheless illustrates this truth. 
We see, there, that sin by bringing its victim so low brings 
him to himself, and he is yet able to turn round and 
start toward a better life. Carlyle has defended very 
vigorously the proposition that evil, tending for a while to 
magnify itself, has but a short run and is self-destructive. 
He praises God that things are so arranged that evil is 
suicidal in its nature. It destroys itself, and not the 
sinner. The sinner, by virtue of the never wholly pros- 
trate will and never utterly dumb conscience, has power 
to forsake his sin and walk righteously. 

Now, if in this world these things are true, as we 
cannot doubt they are, why not believe that in the great 
beyond, rid of the body, rid of evil associates, rid of 
many things that drag men down and keep them low, the 
vicious and depraved soul can and will be touched by 
some divine influence and saved? It seems to me that 
such a thought is rational. And therefore I maintain that 
sin can never put the sinner beyond recovery ; that Con- 
science, however his tongue may cleave to the roof of his 
mouth, is still able to speak the word of duty ; and Will, 
however prostrate he may lie, is still able to rise up and 
obey the command ! 

And, indeed, this seems to be the teaching of Dr. 
Martineau, for he says : 



ANNIHILATION 193 

"And yet precisely because we believe in Retribution, do 
we trust in Restoration. The very abhorrence with which a 
man's better mind ever looks upon his worse, while it inflicts 
his punishment, begins his cure ; and we can never allow that 
God will suspend this natural law impressed by himself on 
our spiritual constitution, merely in order to stop the progress 
of moral recovery and especially enable him to maintain the 
eternity of torment and sin. And so, beyond the dark close 
of life, rise before us the awful contrasts of retribution ; and 
in the farther distance, the dim but glorious vision of a puri- 
fied, redeemed, and progressive universe of souls." Studies, p. 
197. 

3. Annihilation by Divine Fiat. There is just one 
other argument for annihilation which deserves considera- 
tion. It is said that man, owing to his freedom of the will, 
can forever refuse to become good. He can defy God to 
save him, and God being unable to overcome such an 
obdurate will, shall be under the necessity of utterly 
destroying its possessor. This is annihilation by the fiat 
of the Almighty. 

Yon see that those who advance this idea differ 
radically from those who hold that sin weakens and 
destroys the will. These teach that sin has no weakening 
effect on the will power but rather strengthens it ; permits 
and causes the sinner to develop such obstinacy and strength 
of will that God can do nothing with him, but annihilate 
him ! 

In criticising this doctrine, I submit the following 
observations. 

First, it is incredible that any sinner, however wicked, 
will forever refuse to become good. Human nature has 
springs that can be touched by the right appeal, and it is 
credible that God knows how to reach and save the 
wickedest of his children. Xo man that you or I or 

13 



194 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

anybody else ever knew was bad or pursued evil for the 
sake of being wicked. 

Dr. I. M. Attwood reminds us that " Only a devil could 
love evil for its own sake. Men are not devils. They love 
evil for the good that goes with it, or which they imagine 
goes with it. When they awake to the awful truth — as they 
may through fiery trial and bitter defeat — will they finally and 
definitely reject the good and choose evil?" It is incredible 
that any sane creature would do such a thing. 

Secondly, it i^ impossible for the will of man to forever 
array itself against the will and defeat the purpose of God. 
If it came to a final issue, God would prevail, and his 
righteous will would be done. This proposition can be 
made good on two grounds. 

In the first place, if the sinner prove defiant, God 
could bring influences to bear on his will which should 
make him tractable, and end in his obedience and right- 
eousness. 

In the second place, no sinner can forever defy God 
to save him, simply because God is the sovereign of this 
universe and has provided for the carrying out of his pur- 
poses, one of which is that all men shall be saved. 
Why, to teach that man can forever prevent God from 
saving him, is to teach that God is fated: that God must 
do as man wills, and not as he himself proposes. 

Lyman Abbott, who does not believe in eternal punishment, 
but believes in the possibility of annihilation, says: "lam 
not a Universalist because I am not a fatalist. I cannot believe 
that the human will is subject to the fatalism of even a divine 
purpose." 

To which statement the Universalist might well reply : 
" I am not a Partialist because I cannot believe that the 
Divine purpose is subject to the fatalism of the human 



ANNIHILATION 195 

will. I do not believe that the divine will is subject to the 
human will." If God wills that all men shall be saved, 
as Paul says he does, it is not possible for man to defeat 
that purpose of the Almighty. 

And God can, and indeed is, carrying out his inten- 
tion to perfect all men, without interfering with or depriv- 
ing man of the measure of freedom with which he has 
endowed him. It is well to remember that man has but 
a small measure of freedom. No scholar teaches that 
man is an absolutely free agent. Many philosophers 
insist, and with reason, that his freedom is quite limited. 
He is hedged in at every side. He is under the dominion 
of physical and mental and moral laws which he must 
obey — he cannot say no to them. He that will not eat, 
must die. He that will not study, must remain ignorant. 
He that will sin, must pay the penalties. Man cannot do 
as he pleases. God's will is being done whether man 
rebels or not. There is, in the universe, a certain fatalism. 
There are forces at work accomplishing definite, pre- 
arranged ends, over which man has no control, and whose 
ultimate realization he cannot stay. Matthew Arnold 
wisely declares that "there is a power in this universe not 
our own which makes for righteousness." So that the 
Universalist is right in maintaining that as regards ultimate 
issues, God's will must be done. To say that man can 
defeat these ends, is to deny the wisdom, omnipotence, 
and sovereignty of God. 

But the Universalist says that man is not wholly a 
creature of fate. He has a limited but real freedom, by 
means of which he may delay but never defeat the reign 
of righteousness in the world and in his own soul. Man's 
liberty is sufficient to make him a responsible creature, 
and permit him to cultivate a virtuous character, but not 



196 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION 

enough to enable him to destroy himself or frustrate the 
plans of God. 

Professor Tousey says : "Whether I look on this problem 
from the side of philosophy or from the side of my experience 
in the world, I am compelled to believe that as respects certain 
great results, certain far-off ends, there is a positive determinism 
or fatalism in the course of nature and the ways of man.- 
While I know that there is a positive fatalism as respects 
the ultimate issues of creation, I at the same time realize that 
the line of one advance is not precisely fixed, that daily we 
may go to the right or to the left, infallibly, however, to find 
ourselves brought back from these excursions by scourgings 
and penitence. Such is the nature that has been given to us, 
such our environment, such the inevitable fruits of righteous- 
ness and unrighteousness, that it is not in the nature of things 
that we should forever persist in evil. We are doomed to be 
saved. However willful our wanderings, we must at the end 
reappear at our father's gate, though in the case of many of 
us that return be as piteous as the return of the prodigal." 

In view of this exposition I think it plain that it is 
incredible that man should use his freedom of the will to 
forever resist the appeal of God ; and that it is impossible 
for him to do so and thereby defeat the purpose for which 
God created him. "As I live, saith the Lord, to me 
every knee shall bow and every tongue give praise ! " 

Prof. Huxley is right in saying that life might be likened 
to a game of chess. The chess-board is the world; the 
pieces are the phenomena of nature ; the rules are what we 
call the laws, of nature. The Player on the other side is 
hidden from us. He knows every move, and is prepared 
to meet every advance we make. We have many moves, 
and a real measure of choice in our plays. We know 
that our hidden player is always fair, just and patient, and 
we also know that play as we must and play as we will he 



ANNIHILATION 197 

will ultimately checkmate us. This metaphor will remind 
some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has 
depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. 
Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, the calm, 
strong God of the Christian, who is playing for love, as 
we say, and you have an image of human life. The 
wisdom and love of God will finally prevail, and man 
will be checkmated in righteousness ! 

Why Universalists are Dogmatic. I often hear 
it said that Universalists have no philosophical basis for 
teaching that every human being will be saved. Have 
we not refuted that criticism? Have we not seen that it 
is practically impossible for any soul to defeat the purposes 
of God in its behalf? Universalism rests fairly and safely 
upon philosophical grounds. And I venture to claim 
that it is the only system of theology that is philosophical 
and consistent. Postulate the existence of a God who is 
good and wise and omnipotent, and you must, you posi- 
tively must, reach the conclusion that every child of his will 
achieve holiness and happiness. (Indeed, it is a mystery to 
me how any Christian can have a doubt of such an out- 
come. How can a Christian limit "the love and power of 
God?" Any other result than Universal Salvation limits 
the love and power of God. It also denies his wisdom.) 

Think of that trinity of attributes — Omnipotence, Wis- 
dom, and Goodness — ponder them, and then rise up if you 
can and say you see how God's purpose in creation may 
include less than the blessedness of all mankind or how 
his purpose may be eternally frustrated. 

If God is good, he intends the greatest good of every 
living thing ; he contemplates the highest blessedness of 
humanity. If it can be proved that the highest blessed- 
ness possible to man is not to be attained by some men, 



198 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

then it is proved that God is not good. If one soul could 
speak from the depths of hell, it could deny the love of 
God. If one mother should miss the face of a child of 
hers from the company of the redeemed, she could impugn 
the benevolence of the Almighty. Either every soul is to 
be perfected, or else God is not good. 

Again, if God is wisdom, he has not only purposed 
the highest good of his children, but he has planned for 
it. For what does wisdom mean ? Webster says that it 
means "the knowledge of the best ends and the best 
means." What does wisdom imply? Whewell says it 
implies "the selection of the right ends as well as the 
right means." What, then, does wisdom insure? Prof. 
Valentine of the Lutheran Theological Seminary, by no 
means biased in favor of Universalism, says that "wisdom, 
being concerned with the choice of ends and the ways 
of their accomplishment, precludes the choice of either 
moral or physical evil as an end." Therefore, the wise 
God has not chosen endless misery or annihilation as the 
outcome of any human life. Wisdom means the selection 
of the right ends and the right means to those ends. Either 
every soul is to achieve a right end or God is not wise. 

Once more, if God is omnipotent, he has not only 
purposed and planned that every one of his offspring 
become holy and happy, but he is able to accomplish his 
purpose and his plans. Nothing can defeat the Almighty . 
An all-powerful God may be delayed in the accomplishment 
of his designs by the freedom he has permitted man, but he 
cannot be delayed forever. Either every soul will arrive 
at the goal set up by God in the beginning, or else he is 
not omnipotent : he is not God. 

We believe that God is omnipotent, wise and good — 
all Christians believe these three things of God. How 



ANNIHILATION 190 

can they escape the Universalist conclusion? Only by 
practically denying what they theoretically profess to 
believe. Friend, if you believe God is all-powerful, all- 
wise and all-good you have reached a frame of mind 
which is Universalistic. Your only recourse is to avow 
Universal Salvation or change your frame of mind, and 
lose your God ! Why hesitate between such alternatives ? 
Why not take the very best view of God and his world 
that can possibly be taken ? Why not become a thorough- 
going optimist, especially as you have weighty reasons 
for looking; on the brightest side of the outcome of human 
life? Why not join in the song of clear-eyed Robert 
Browning, ff God is in his heavens : all's well with the 
world " ? or in Whittier's hymn of certainty : 

"Thro' all the depths of sin and loss 
Drops the plummet of the cross. 
Never yet abyss was found 
Deeper than the cross could sound." 

" I know he is, and what he is 
Whose one great purpose is the good of all." 

Why not have the true insight of the old mystic, 
Angelus Silesius, ana 1 say, as he said, "I know God 
cannot live an instant without me. He must give up the 
ghost if I should cease to be." Yes, why not believe that 

"Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul 
Which, quickened by love's breath, may yet pervade the whole " ? 

That when the heavenly Father places his hand on the head 
of his most willful child as no human hand was ever laid 
thereon and speaks to the heart of that child as no human 
voice ever spoke to it, the gesture and appeal of love will 
not be in vain ? Why doubt Jesus Christ, who said, "And 
I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto 
me'" ? Why refrain from Paul's triumphant shout : " Every 
knee shall bow and every tongue give praise to God ! " 



LECTUEE X 

IMMORTALITY 

" One question, more than others all, 
From thoughtful minds implores reply: 
It is, as breathed from star and pall, 
What fate awaits us when we die ? " 

To a certain extent, this question has been answered 
in the previous lectures. We have seen that neither 
unending misery, nor endless sin, nor annihilation awaits 
us when we die. If nothing, not even sin, can annihilate 
us, neither in this world nor any other, then it is nega- 
tively proven that we are immortal. Our last lecture, in 
establishing the indestructibility of the soul, prepared us 
for hearing whatever positive reasons there may be for 
expecting a conscious, personal existence beyond the 
grave. 

It hardly seemed necessary to devote a lecture to justi- 
fying the faith in immortality which is now so common 
and beautiful, and which keeps gaining converts among 
the best intellects and purest hearts in every race. There 
never was a time when so many people expected to live 
after death as do to-day. Every existing and influential 
religion has now a doctrine of a future life. The Taoist, 
the Shintoist, the Modern Jew, the Brahmin, the Bud- 
dhist, the Mohammedan and the Christian each and all 
look for some kind of existence after death. And yet it 
is true that in every country and in every church there 
are some who deny or doubt the doctrine. In our own 
Christian land, we find not a few who raise the great 



IMMORTALITY 201 

question that Job asked: "If a man die, shall he live 
again?" To which question some reply with a blunt No, 
saying that the night of the grave has no morning ; others 
simply confess that they don't know ; while others eagerly 
declare that they wished they knew certainly. For the 
benefit of those who are really seeking light on this sub- 
ject, I submit the considerations that follow. 

Doubts of Immortality. I. Many are inclined to 
doubt that there is a life beyond the grave because the 
departed do not return. Friends and loved ones, who 
have promised to reappear or make some unmistakable 
sign if they were still alive, have failed to do so. This 
failure has caused many to fear and some to disbelieve that 
there is any other life. But may we not say certain things 
which Avill remove the doubts that arise from this cause? 
(1). Jesus Christ came back. He promised to return, and 
he did. His reappearance is one of the best attested facts 
of history. (2). There are people to-day, whose character 
is sterling, and whose word is "as good as gold," who 
declare that they hold communication with friends who 
have passed into the other life. I have never had any 
such privilege, nor do I personally know any one that has, 
and yet I am far from denying such reports. "Psychic 
Science " is only in its infancy, and yet it has revealed 
some unheard of and almost incredible powers of the mind, 
so that it is not unreasonable that minds in the other life 
may communicate with minds in this world. (3). If, how- 
ever, it should prove, upon sufficient investigation, that 
no one reallv ever had interchange of thought with the 

. CO 

departed ; and if it could be demonstrated that such inter- 
change was physically and psychically impossible, the idea 
of immortality would not be exploded. For believers 
would say that they hardly thought it was possible for 



202 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION 

beings in the other life, constituted as spirits must be, 
to communicate in any sensible way with us in this world 
constituted as we are. Spiritual beings must be " spiritu- 
ally" discerned, and we must wait for the power of such 
discernment, until we are in the same region and condition 
as they. (4). However, this does not imply that the 
spirits of the departed are ever far from us, nor does it 
imply that we may not hold spiritual communion with 
them. It is fundamental in our theologies that while we 
cannot sensibly apprehend God, because he is spirit, we 
can yet hold true, spiritual communion with him ; for 
instance, through prayer. And I believe that this same 
doctrine holds with other spirits than Grocl. Paul spake 
reasonably when he said, f ' we are compassed about by a 
great cloud of witnesses." If (t death-bed visions " indicate 
anything they indicate that our departed live, and are 
never far from any one of us. 

II. As regards the oldest and perhaps the commonest 
and the most plausible argument against the immortality 
of the soul, namely, that the body and the soul, or the 
brain and the mind, are identical or related as cause and 
effect, and therefore the death of one means the cessation 
of the other, we are now able to say with scientific cer- 
tainty that the argument is fallacious. There is no evi- 
dence that the brain produces the mind as the dynamo 
generates the electric light. Modern physiological and 
psychological investigations show that the body and the 
soul or the brain and the mind go together not as cause 
and effect but as concomitants. The body affects the mind 
and the mind affects the body, it is true ; but their rela- 
tionship is co-operative ; not indissoluble. Neither is 
bound to the other inextricably, for in due time they kiss 
each other and part. 



IMMORTALITY 203 

Mr. Herbert Spencer assures us, " that a unit of feeling 
has nothing in common with a unit of motion, becomes more 
than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition." 
Professor John Draper, in his Physiology, says : " It is for the 
physiologist to assert and uphold the doctrine of the oneness, 
the accountability, and the immortality of the soul, and the 
great truth that, as there is but one God in the Universe, so 
there is but one spirit in man. We have established the 
existence of the intellectual principle as external to the body." 

And Mr. John Fiske, whose word means much to every 
scholarly mind, declares that "The only thing which cerebral 
physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular 
physics, is against the materialist so far as it goes. It tells us 
that, during the present life, though thought and feeling are 
always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, 
yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense 
the products of matter. Nothing can be more unscientific 
than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes 
thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say 
that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain 
is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with 
which thought and feeling are in some way related, not as 
effects or causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear ; but 
cerebral physiology says nothing about another life. Indeed, 
why should it ? The last place in the world to which I should 
go for information about a state of things in which thought and 
feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum would be to cere- 
bral physiology." And he concludes by saying that " the mate- 
rialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and 
that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the 
body, is perhaps the most baseless assumption that is known 
to the history of philosophy." 

James Martineau pointedly asks : " If no one can discern 
the connection (between the brain and the mind) to be nec- 
essary, who can affirm their disconnection to be impossible? 
I conclude, therefore, that in the physical phenomena of 



204 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

death there is nothing to prejudge the question of life beyond. 
Death is only the vanishing of the present evidences of life, 
and leaves it open to us to consider whether there are any 
other indications or reasons to replace them." 

A Caution. It is well for us to be cautioned against 
the expectation that the immortality of the soul can be 
demonstrated. In the very nature of the case this is 
not possible, for how can any one prove that any future 
experience or event will occur? 

You cannot be sure that the sun will appear again. 
You cannot declare positively that summer will return. 
You can predict these things : you can say you are as 
good as sure of them ; but because they are future events 
and out of your control and subject to the laws of change, 
you cannot prove that they will take place or affirm such 
a thing upon oath. If I chose to doubt your assertion 
that the sun would shine once more or that the summer 
flowers would bloom again, you would have to be content 
with telling me to wait and see. And yet your reply 
would not weaken your faith or your position, for you 
could marshal reasons enough to make it very probable 
that the sun and the summer would reappear. So with 
regard to the immortality of the soul. Being a future 
experience, it cannot be demonstrated any more than any 
other coming experience can be proved, but this admission 
need not weaken the faith or the position of one who is 
confident that it lies before every soul, for he has evidence 
enough to make it highly probable. The thing to be 
borne in mind is this : immortality is not a thing to be 
demonstrated as we demonstrate a mathematical 'prop- 
osition: it is a thing to be predicted: predicted in 
view of certain evidences that indicate it and even 
make it necessary . The fair question to ask is whether 



IMMORTALITY 205 

the evidence for it is enough to warrant its prediction and 
to justify this almost universal confidence in it. I now 
proceed to give what impress me as among the weightiest 
reasons for the belief in a future life, prefacing my remarks 
with an endorsement of Emerson's frank admission that 
"after all, the best writing on immortality, leaves 
unwritten and unexpressed the really great forces of 
conviction." 

I. In examining the evidences for human immor- 
tality, first look into the constitution and condition 
of man. It is not unlikely that the expectation of a 
future life has grown up in the mind of the race — for it 
has been a growth — through the experiences and the 
study of the human soul. 

( 1 ) . The first significant fact that meets us in our 
study of man is that he desires to live again. There are 
exceptions, chiefly among shirkers and scoundrels, but the 
desire for immortality is practically universal. Man 
wants to survive. He does not wish the grave to be his 
goal. Now, icant) whether regarded as instinctive or 
rational, is prophetic : it augurs satisfaction. All instincts 
have their correspondences. 

"A root strikes downward in the earth, seeking some- 
thing — seeking moisture. Moisture is. It does not go in quest 
of something that does not exist. The blade comes upward, 
seeking something — air and sunlight. Air and sunlight are. 
God has made provision for this want of the growing corn. 
So of every creature that lives. You cannot conceive of any 
want of a fish that swims, or a beast that roams, or a bird 
that flies, for which no provision has been made. And it is so 
with man. He is hungry, and the earth teems with abundance. 
He is thirsty, and a spring bubbles at his feet. He desires 
companionship, and friends are all about him to share his love 
and return their own." 



206 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

The wants and desires of man's nature are therefore 
prophetic : they bid him look for and expect to find that 
which he instinctively craves. Hence this longing for 
immortality, is an augury of a continued life. It has 
become a powerful factor in the endeavor to prove worthy 
of living on, which is so splendid a feature of human 
activity to-day. And this endeavor has actually brought 
immortality to light in multitudes of souls ; they feel their 
deathlessness. So that Matthew Arnold spoke from expe- 
rience when he said : 

" O human soul! so long as thou canst so 
Set up a mark of everlasting light. 
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, 
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, 
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night; 
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." 

(2). In addition to man's instinctive and intelligent 
desire to live forever, we note that he has the capacity 
for endless life. The possibilities of man's nature are 
boundless. There seems to be no limit to the develop- 
ment of which his soul is capable. Think of his capacity 
for knoivledge. No human intellect has exhausted the 
facts of this universe, nor have the facts of this universe 
exhausted any normal human intellect. The mind of a 
Plato, stored as it was with knowledge, was yet able to 
take in more. The mind of a Spencer, or a Martineau, 
wonderfully rich in modern intellectual lore, is open to 
information ad infinitum. If we think of man's capacity 
for affection, we realize that it is infinite. Affection 
usually is circumscribed and often selfish ; but it can be 
unlimited and utterly unselfish. It is possible for man to 
love everybody and everything, as Plato taught, and as 
Jesus did. True love knows nothing of time or space. 
The soul's capacity to love is indicative of its ability to 



IMMORTALITY 207 

inhabit a perpetual world. Think also of man's capacity 
for goodness, and you see a clear sign of his immortality. 
In this capacity, man leads creation : he was born to be 
good : he is commanded by conscience to become alto- 
gether righteous, and he feels that it is possible for him to 
obey the command perfectly, but not at present. The 
time is too short for him to round out his character here. 
The simple fact is, man's capacity shows that he was built 
for immortality. We see in this expansiveness of his 
nature a provision for endless life. Infinite capacity does 
not mean temporal existence ; not in a rational universe ! 

(3). Man has the desire for immortality ; he has the 
capacity for profitably and pleasantly employing endless 
years ; he has also an endowment of faculties which 
especially fit him for another world than this. Plants and 
animals, so far as we can see, are fitted out with powers 
and instincts sufficient only for this fleeting life and capable 
of being fully satisfied here. But with man it is different ; 
he has a spiritual nature which does not and cannot find 
its full satisfaction either in this world or in this body. 
"Appetite, passions, instincts, man shares with the 
animals, gets them from the animals, if you will, but 
satisfy them all, leave him not a physical need unsatisfied, 
nor a bodily want unsupplied, and only then does he really 
begin to live." Reason, intellect, awe, wonder, the sense 
of beauty, conscience — these are endowments in excess of 
man's physical and present needs. He could get along 
perhaps more easily, and certainly more happily than he 
now does, if he were simply endowed as the highest 
animals are. This over-endowment then must mean 
something in a rational universe. 

" Some sort of proportion we expect, and never fail to 
find, between the endowment of a nature and the persistency 



208 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

and range of its achievement ; just as, in human productions, 
the material selected and the refined pains spent in perfecting 
them, are no uncertain index of the service expected of them. 
The parcel to be delivered in the next street, the tradesman 
does not wrap up in waterproof and fasten with wire ropes ; 
for a few weeks' encampment, you spread your canvas and do 
not build of stone ; nor is it for a summer's lodging, but for 
your ancestral house, that you set up fountains and plant oaks. 
When, on this principle, you place side by side the needs of 
human life, taken on the most liberal estimate, and the scope 
of the intellectual powers of man, I shall be surprised if you 
do not find the latter to be an enormous over-provision for the 
former," and to suggest that the scene of human existence and 
achievement is to shift from this world-stage to the spiritual 
arena of immortality. Man has already broken loose from 
physical environment and has passed up, through, and beyond 
it. He waits for deliverance from his body : his spirit looks 
toward that city not built with hands, eternal in the heavens. 

(4). How firm this conviction that man is immortal 
grows, as we see, furthermore, how incomplete men are, 
even at their best estate, in this world. The greatest men 
are still unsymmetrical when called to quit this sphere. 
Three-score years and ten are far too few even for the 
most gifted and most privileged and most responsive 
nature to become what it wants to be or is able to be. 
No man counts himself to have apprehended. Every 
man is still pressing on toward the prizes of the high 
calling of spiritual life. We hear this confession and see 
this incompleteness on every side. 

Says Dr. Hedge: " Everywhere we see great powers and 

small performances, vast schemes and petty results, thoughts 

that wander through eternity and a life that 

' Can little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die.' 

Who ever lived to accomplish his utmost aim ? What career 



IMMORTALITY 209 

so complete as to comprehend all that is wanted in this world? 
We all retire with imperfect victory from the battle of life. 
The campaign is not finished when we strike tents. The scholar 
has still unsolved problems at which he is laboring. The phi- 
losopher is summoned in the midst of experiments he cannot 
stay to complete. The philanthropist is overtaken in projects 
of reform that are to add new value to human life." 

James Martineau, at more than eighty years of age, 
standing near the close of a career marvelously full of 
attainment, exclaims: "How small a part of my plans 
have I been able to carry out ! Life, even at its fullest 
on earth, is a fragment." Not only is life too short to 
carry out one's plans, it is too brief to perfect character. 

Victor Hugo, in his old age, declared : " For half a century 
I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse. History, 
philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song — 
I have tried all. But I feel that I have not said a thousandth 
part of what is in me. AYhen I go down to the grave, I can 
say, like so many others, ' I have finished my day's work,' but 
I cannot say I have finished my life." 

Incompleteness, both of work and character ; what does 
it prophesy but completion? "The half-finished picture, 
the partly-chiseled statue, the roofless edifice, bid us wait, 
that the end is not yet. Wherever we see wisdom and 
purpose displayed in man's productions, and find incom- 
pleteness, we believe that the task is not finished. And 
so far as we have beheld the processes of nature, we know 
that she never stops short of completion. The egg in the 
nest is not the end ; the tiny form within the egg, is not 
the end. Only when the shell bursts, and the songster 
spreads its wings and soars and sings, is the task finished. 
The egg was an augury of the bird. The wings prophesied 
its element and its power. These latent abilities within 



210 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

us ; the incomplete faculties which we all possess, wait on 
another and longer life in which to be developed and per- 
fected. They indicate the relations we are to enter into. 
They bid us feel sure that the grave is not the end. They 
warrant Victor Hugo's last words : " My day's work will 
begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind 
alley ; it is a thoroughfare. I close on the twilight, to 
open with the dawn." 

Knowing man's desire, knowing his capacity, knowing 
his spiritual characteristics, and knowing his sad incom- 
j)leten*ess, we are justified in thinking that when he knocks 
at the door of death, it will swing open that he may con- 
tinue his onward and upward walk ! 

II. We become surer of this eternal prospect for every 
soul as we turn from a study of man's constitution and 
condition to an examination of the nature of God and 

HIS PURPOSE IN CREATION. 

A wise philosopher has said : "If once you allow yourself 
to think about the origin and the end of things, you will have 
to believe in a God and immortality." A certain minister was 
presenting a course of thought on " The Immortality of the 
Soul," when he was approached very early in the course by a 
Scotch parishioner, who remarked, "You make a deal ado 
over a sma' matter ; postulate God and immortality follows." 
This reminds us of the argument of Rousseau, another swift 
and effective nature. Said he : "I believe in God as fully as 
I believe in any other truth. If God exists, he is perfect; 
if he is perfect, he is wise, almighty and just ; if he is just 
and almighty, my soul is immortal." 1 

(1). If we regard God's nature as love, as the Bible 
and best Christian thought teaches us to do, we have an 
indubitable argument for our doctrine of immortality. 

1 " "Witness to Immortality." — (Gordon.) 



IMMORTALITY 211 

God is love ! that is the ultimate and grandest word about 
God. The core of God's heart is love. Everything else 
we predicate of God, except his infinity and omniscience 
and omnipotence, grows out of his love or is regulated by 
it. ''Wisdom and power are the instruments of love; 
justice, and mercy, and pity, and -righteousness are inflec- 
tions of love." The characteristic of the highest love we 
know anything about, namely, love as displayed by Jesus, 
is that it seeketh no selfish or partial end, but looketh to 
the highest good of others. We must believe that God, 
like Jesus or like a loving parent, seeks the utmost good 
of his children and finds his truest joy in their highest 
attainment. Therefore, we must believe in the immortality 
of every soul because endless life in a love-ruled Universe 
is a desirable inheritance, and necessary to the utmost 
o-ood of humanity. God's children would fall short of 
their highest good if they missed immortality, for they 
cannot reach perfection in the time alloted them in this 
world. The love of God, which relates him parentally 
and vitally to every human being, we may be sure led him 
to begin creation and to appoint the great destiny we are 
taught to believe is before us and to arrange the course by 
which our perfection is to be achieved. It should not 
surprise us in studying our present constitution and the 
world in which we live to find evidences of an Infinite 
Heart working steadily and beautifully in our behalf. 
And what is the history and the prophecy of this universe 
as revealed in the light of the theory of its evolution ? 

" Way back yonder, in the unremembered past, on the bleak 
and barren hills lay one single germ of life. Nowhere else in 
all the world was there a single twig or grass blade to keep it 
company. It had only the sun and stars for companions. But 
the winds kissed it, the sun called to it, the rain watered it. 



212 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Wait a million (or was it ten million?) years. Lo ! the hills 
are covered with verdure, great trees lift themselves in air, 
the forests are vocal with the song of birds. All this gar- 
ment of green, these mighty trunks, these singing birds, were 
hidden away in that first life-germ. Suppose you could see a 
common piece of moss unfold before your eyes — see it passing 
into grasses and trees and lilies, — by silent stages see it pass 
into animals, until at last the moss has become a singing bird, 
soaring upward into the deep of heaven, which it floods with 
melody. Would you need any other miracle than that to teach 
you of a purpose infinite? Such is the story of science, and 
still the tale unfolds. At last — and how countless the ages 
between ! — it issues into man, — man with infinite capacities ! 
Crude and savage at first, but slowly unfolding, until, at last, an 
eye looks out upon the world which knows that it is beautiful ; 
looks back over the long, long journey which he has come, and 
at least in part comprehends it. And now the cycle seems to 
be complete. Nature has travailed through countless ages, a 
child is born that looks up into her face, and loves her, and 
knows that she is beautiful. It is as when the mother, after 
years of watching over her baby boy, until he has grown strong 
and true, at last looks into his frank and open face, and says : 
1 Now I know by the love gleaming in his eyes that I can 
trust him. For this I have yearned, in this I find the reward 
of my pain and deprivation, — in this love that answers mine.' 
So out of the heart of Nature there comes a voice to me with 4 
accents sweet and tender as a mother's, saying : ' My child, I 
love thee.' Nature is God ; God says : ' My child, I love 
thee.' What then? Does he lay us one by one into the grave 
never to see us again ? Has he planned it that even as the 
universe must one day be dissolved into its elements, all his 
children must likewise pass away and forever cease to be? 
What an end of the story of creation ! ' Nothing, absolutely 
nothing but gas and smoke. There, after the birth-throes of 
ten million reons, after all the struggles and the sacrifices, 
loves and hopes and aspirations of humanity, — there, in a 



IMMORTALITY 213 

wreath of smoke which no eye beholds, in lurid flames which 
leap out into the bosom of chaos, there it ends. So considered, 
creation becomes a meaningless riddle. There is no meaning 
in the story unless something abides." 

That abiding something must be the human soul in 
which alone the hope of immortality and the capacity for 
it are lodged. Not one soul only, or a few souls, but all 
human souls, for the heart of God, like the heart of a 
devoted mother, is as warm toward one child as another 
and seeks the perpetuity of all. 

Well does Mr. John Fiske say : " From the first dawning of 
life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, 
the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which 
characterize humanity. Has all this work been for nothing? 
Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? 
On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle 
without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend 
that process of evolution, by which things have come to be 
what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the 
everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob 
the whole process of meaning. It goes far toward putting us 
to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any- 
one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient 
reason for accepting so dire an alternative. . . . For my own 
part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul ... as 
a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work." 

In the very nature of things, man must be immortal. 
If man were to sink back into nothingness, God would 
forfeit his title to wisdom, justice and love, and the uni- 
verse would lose all significance to reasonable minds and 
great hearts. On the reasonableness of God's work, that 
is, on the orderly and definite and ascending development 
of the universe, we ground our faith in the immortality of 
the soul as upon a rock. And if we could but stand at 



214 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

the side of God and see all things from his point of view, 
our belief would be confirmed and glorified, for in God's 
vision there can be no death : what seems so to us, to him 
is transition, for in his sight the whole boundless universe 
must be alive. Verily, as Christ said : "God is not God 
of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto him ! " 

III. The study of the longings and possibilities of man 
and the study of the history and trend of the universe lead 
us to but one conclusion — man was created to be immor- 
tal and is destined for so great a lease on life. 

Are there no confirmations of this magnificent faith ? 

(1). Run back through the ages and stand in the 
twilight of Christian history. Before you looms up a 
cross, around it mocking soldiers, upon it the purest soul 
that ever trod God's earth. The darkness deepens, a sigh 
of grief and a word of trust fall upon the trembling air, 
and the tragedy is finished. The body is entombed ; the 
friends have dispersed ; the curtain in what promised to 
be a drama of human redemption seems fallen never more 
to rise. But no ! The stone is rolled away from the 
tomb, the Christ reappears, is seen by his own and a mul- 
titude, walks and talks with his disciples, gives them 
instructions, blesses them, bids them good-by and ascends 
to his Father and their Father, his God and their God. 
They believe that they have seen the crucified Lord : they 
believe that he has recommissioned them to save the race : 
they believe that he has arisen and will be with them even 
unto the end of the world, and Christianity begins its mar- 
velous career. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus 
Christ remain to-day two of the best authenticated events 
of history. They are confirmatory of our belief in the 
resurrection and ascension of the dead. If these events 
are too far away or if they partake too much of the mirac- 



IMMORTALITY 215 

ulous to help some of us, then we may look in other 
directions for the confirmation of our hope. 

(2). Look within. Let us ask ourselves some prob- 
ing questions. " O soul, can you think of being anni- 
hilated? extinguished? blotted out?" "Nay, Master, I 
cannot think myself annihilated." Where is the soul 
that can conceive of its own extinction? "Let a man 
imagine himself dead : he is a beholder of his lifeless 
body : he looks upon his own coffin : he is present at his 
own funeral : he sees his own grave dug, filled in, covered 
over, and the flowers of love resting upon it. He cannot 
.think of himself as dead. He may imagine his body to 
be lifeless, but he is still soul and more alive than he ever 
was." The unthinkableness of the death or extinction of 
one's soul testifies to our spiritual deathlessness. 

(3). Ask your soul another question. " O soul, have 
you ever been annihilated?" "Nay, Master, though the 
bodies I have tenanted have come and gone, a new one 
every seven years, I have held to my identity, as I see 
when I look through the pages of memory. I to-day am 
the soul that you had in infancy ; permanent amid every 
change." This knowledge of the persistency of one's 
self, substantiates the argument that the soul and the 
body are merely associated together and not inseparably 
related to each other. That which has been able to sur- 
vive one or more complete dissolutions of the body, will 
surely be able to go its own way when the last dissolution 
is done. 

(4). Ask yourself a further question. "Have you 
never vividly realized the possible independence of 
your soul of your body?" Let me ask the paralytic, if 
while he could not move hand or foot, his mind was not 
as clear and as resolute as it ever was, waiting as it seemed 



216 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

to leap out of an unresponsive frame and pursue a free 
career in another state? Let me ask the dreamer, if he 
has not at times in his dreams quitted his tabernacle of 
flesh and roamed at will, and delightfully, through other 
scenes than those of earth? What are these experiences 
but auguries ? They indicate the separableness of the soul, 
and prophesy its future career. 

(5). But go deeper. Ask yourself if you really 
expect to perish. Do you in your heart of hearts 
look EOR extinction at death ? There certainly is no 
righteous man or woman before me who anticipates 
annihilation. It is a remarkable and significant fact that 
as one grows in goodness, the conviction of immortality 
deepens. The meaning of Christ's paradoxical saying 
that "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, 
shall never die," is this : Those who are in sympathy with 
the life of God through holy living and holy aspirations 
neither die nor ever think of dying. The more of God's 
life we have in our souls, the less attraction the earth 
has for us and the greater our certainty of a future life. 

Matthew Arnold has keenly said that the certainty of 
immortality flows out of "the Sense of life, of being truly 
alive, which accompanies righteousness. If this experimental 
sense does not rise to be stronger in us, does not rise to the 
sense of being inextinguishable, that is probably because our 
sense of righteousness is really so. very small. This strong 
sense of life from righteousness ... is the true basis of all 
religious aspiration after immortality." 

Through the sense of righteousness, Socrates laughed 
at those who thought in burying his body they would be 
burying him ; through righteousness, Jesus when he quit 
this earth informed his friends that he would meet them 



IMMORTALITY 217 

again ; through righteousness, Paul and the long line of 
saintly men and women down the Christian centuries have 
lived immortal lives and in passing away have commended 
their spirits trustingly to God. 

4 'The Mussulmans have a fable about Moses, that, when 
the hour of his departure was come, God sent the angel of 
death, who appeared before him and demanded his soul. 
Moses greeted the angel Avith a friendly salutation, but ques- 
tioned his right to touch a soul that had had communion with 
God. The death-angel was baffled by such assurance, and 
knew not how to proceed ; for death and Moses, it seemed, had 
nothing in common. Then the Lord deputed the angel of 
Paradise to convey him an apple of Eden. And, as Moses 
inhaled the immortal fragrance, his spirit went forth from him, 
and was borne upon the odors of Eden into the presence of the 
Lord." This is the Mussulman's parable, and this is the 
interpretation of it : the righteous know they are immortal ; 
they never think of dying ; they expect to part with their 
fleshly bodies, but as for themselves, — well, let Death catch 
them if he can ! 

You cannot convince a soul that holds sweet com- 
munion with God that its communion will ever be broken 
up, nor can you make a person who loves believe that 
love is not deathless or that love can ever lose its own. 
Probably no man ever struggled with the problem of the 
future as Tennyson did. A man of great and keen 
intellect, master of modern knowledge ; and a man also 
of deep and wide sympathies, he found himself plunged 
into a terrible problem by the death of his bosom friend, 
Arthur Henry Hallam, whom he loved as his own self. 
"Loss, inexpressible loss, opened the poet's eyes to the 
appalling fact of death. Love made him eager to believe 
in immortality, and able to conceive of that immortality 
in the noblest and so in the most creditable form. His 



218 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

subtle, questioning intellect made belief difficult, and thus 

raised the issue, Is the soul, after all, a deathless thing ?" 

The matchless poem, "In Memorium," is the outcome 

and the record of Tennyson's soul toward the light. 

From beginning to close, it shows the stages by which 

that big intellect and bigger heart came to join forces in 

favor of immortality. The heart triumphed. Doubts 

were dispelled, and Tennyson said : 

"If e'er when faith had fallen asleep 
I heard a voice, ' believe no more,' 
A warmth within my breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answer'd, ' I have felt.' " 

The history of the intellectual and spiritual struggle 

with the problem of immortality told in that poem, is a 

history that finds duplication in countless lives ; and as 

there, so elsewhere, true love wins the victory and looks 

steadily forward to further life and reunions. Whittier, in 

" Snow-Bound," has recorded the same splendid triumph 

of heart-faith over intellectual doubt, by saying : 

" Yet love will dream, and faith will trust 
(Since he who knows our need is just), 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must." 

(6). Speaking of the dream-side and imaginative- 
side Of life, WHO HAS NOT HAD INTIMATIONS OF IMMOR- 
TALITY? Some in dreams, some through recollections, 
some by premonitions, have become sure of a life beyond. 

Many, like Wordsworth, have been able to remember 

the sensations of their childhood days, 

" When meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight did seem 
Apparaled in celestial light," 

Indicating the heavenly origin and heavenly destiny of the 

soul. 



IMMORTALITY 219 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The soul that riseth with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar : 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 

From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 

Shades of the prison house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 

He sees it in his joy." 

Although our crowded life is a forgetting of early 
years and early impressions, yet there are times when 
the visions of childhood are granted us and the intima- 
tions of immortality we felt then, return with sweet force. 
Some recall the intimations of immortality felt in child- 
hood ; others stand firm and expectantly because of the 
intimations experienced to-day. "A vague, con- 
straining sense of invisible beings, by whom we are engirt, 
fills many of us. We blindly feel that our rank and 
destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we 
think, and the occult Universe of Spirit would break to 
vision with cloudy crowds of angels." Are we deceived? 
or, are these premonitions? They are premonitions, if 
the glad exclamations and gestures of the dying are to be 
relied upon. The phenomena of a mental sort associated 
with physical dying, are precisely such as we should expect 
if life were continuous, and what we call dying were cross- 
ing the threshold. When Dr. Lyman Beecher was dying, 
he saw what caused him to rouse not only from dying 
stupor, but from a mental stupidity of years, and to shout 
his joy. "Do you see Jesus?" asked a by-stander. 
"No ! no !" he replied. "All is swallowed up in God." 
Almost every physician and nurse can tell you of dying 



220 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

utterances like this. A keen thinker has said: "You 
may as well say the first cry of an infant indicates no rela- 
tion to a new phase of life, because it is uttered on the 
inner threshold of the womb. It is an absolute misappre- 
hension of facts to assert that dying in the majority of 
cases, or even the large minority, appears to be a passing 
out of existence. The testimony is astonishingly the other 
way ; and the exceptions are positively rare where there 
is not something to indicate a passage to a higher state of 
being." 

I have not tried to demonstrate the immortality of the 
soul : I have simply sought to justify the faith of Christen- 
dom and the serene confidence of most of the greatest 
spirits of all ages in a future conscious existence. 

If evidence is worth anything at all, we have examined 

enough to convince us that our life is not to be confined 

to this present world. I have come to feel that Emerson 

was right in saying that, "It is a mark of the sanity of 

a man's nature to believe in immortality '." Every soul 

should, and every loving soul does, join in the song of the 

dying Tennyson : 

" Sunset and even star 
And one clear call for me! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea; 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 

When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again to home. 

Twilight and even bell, . 

And after that the dark! 

And may there be no sadness of farewell. 

When I embark; 

For though from out our bourne of time and place 

The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar." 



LECTURE XI 

HEAVEN 

" We must come to believe that countless spirits go into the next life 
to meet trials and burdens which are not punishment or doom, but 
discipline, education, the preparation for life." — T. Starr King. 

"In the middle of the room, in its white coffin, lay the 

dead child, a nephew of the poet. Near it, in a great 

chair, sat Walt Whitman, surrounded by little ones, and 

holding a beautiful little girl in his lap. The child looked 

curiously at the spectacle of death, and then inquiringly 

into the old man's face. ? You don't know what it is, do 

you, my dear?' said he. 'We don't, either.' Mary 

Mapes Dodge, taking this touching incident as a text, has 

written a poem, "The Two Mysteries," in which she says : 

" We know not what it is, dear, this sleep so deep and still; 
The folded hands, the awful calm, the cheek so pale and chill; 
The lids that will not lift again, though we may call and call; 
The strange, white solitude of peace that settles over all. 

But this we know: our loved and dead, if they should come 

this day, — 
Should come and ask us, ' What is life? ' no one of us could say. 
Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be." 

It is true that life and death are mysterious : no one 

has as yet solved all their problems for us ; but much light 

has been thrown on each phenomenon. We have probed 

the mystery of death sufficiently to see that it is not the 

final event in the history of a soul. We have many and 

cogent reasons for looking upon it as but an incident in 

the career of man. Death simply arrests the body, and 

releases the soul. 



222 GOOD SENSE IN KELIGION 

The question arises : What will be the experiences of 
the soul after its bodily release ? What of the future life ? 

It is impossible to glean from the Bible any details by 
which to describe the scenery of the future life, for (a) 
Jesus Christ, the only traveler that has ever returned from 
that other land, has furnished us not a word descriptive of 
it. He has assured us that certain cherished things would 
take place there, but he has not told us where or what 
our future abode is to be. (6) . The writer of Revelations 
has not helped us any. He was not describing a future 
existence beyond this earth, but a New Jerusalem that 
was to take the place of the Old Jerusalem there in Pales- 
tine. His imagery had reference to an earthly renovation 
which did not come when prophesied, and to our mind 
will never come in the paraphernalia described by him. 
(c). It is also difficult, as Dr. Hedge has confessed, "to 
deduce from the Scriptures of the New Testament a doc- 
trine of the life to come, which shall fit all the texts and 
satisfy all the requirements of the subject ; which shall 
harmonize the Apocalyptic vision of the " new earth " and 
the New Jerusalem upon it, with Paul's conception of 
being raised from the dead and caught up into the clouds 
to dwell with the Lord in the air ; which shall harmonize 
any doctrine of final resurrection with the words of Jesus 
to the thief on the cross, "This day shalt thou be with me 
in Paradise." 

Whatever the reasons for the meagerness and diversity 
of information on our subject in the Scriptures, and in 
spite of the warnings about the futility and even the 
danger of trying to look into the future, man still has an 
insatiable curiosity to know something about it. When 
Gen. Armstrong, among his last words, said, "I am most 
curious to get a glimpse of the next world," he voiced the 



HEAVEN 223 

craving of almost all people. Furthermore, the mind will 
not rest content in ignorance. It will dream of the future, 
it will seize the brush of imagination and paint pictures of 
its own and deem them realities. 

The Christian has his dreams of the coining life. They 
grow out of the teachings of his particular sect or take 
color from his experiences. Some accept the glittering 
tropes of Revelations as statements of realities, and others 
receive the visions of a Swedenborg as veritable pictures 
of eternity ; but the majority of Christians are more sen- 
sible in their expectations, and think of the beyond as 
being all that they would supremely like the present to 
be. Whatever our imaginings, we all echo the poet's sigh : 

" O for a nearer insight into heaven, 
More knowledge of the glory and the joy 
Which there unto the happy souls is given, 
Their intercourse, their worship, their employ." 

Such nearer insight into the beyond must come, it 
seems to me, mainly through inference. We cannot lift 
the veil between the two spheres and gaze with entranced 
mind upon the other scene, but we can reason from what 
we might call " the nature of things " and arrive at some 
trustworthy and wholesome conclusions. 

In the nature of things, it seems to me that the most 
reasonable theory of the future life is that it is a con- 
tinuation of the present life. 

John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Immortality, closes by 
saying that " all the probabilities in case of a future life are that 
such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the 
change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter ; and that 
the fact of death will make no sudden break in our spiritual 
life, nor influence our character any otherwise than as any 
important change in our mode of existence may always be 
expected to modify it. Our thinking principle has its laws 



224 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

which in this life are invariable, and any analogies drawn from 
this life must assume that the same laws will continue." 

Although I do not agree with some of the conclusions 
Mr. Mill arrives at in his essay, I do heartily accept the 
ideas just quoted. The Christian and most rational view 
of death is that which likens it to sleep, with the impor- 
tant difference, that whereas in ordinary sleep we awake, 
our body still with us, in the death sleep we awake, out 
of our body. rr We " awake ; that is, our soul awakes, 
while our old body slumbers on forever. Now inasmuch 
as our true life is not something outside of us, but within 
us, our life will not be materially altered by the scenes to 
which death introduces us. Of course, in stepping out of 
the fleshly body, we shall get rid of all the appetites and 
passions and needs peculiar to the flesh, but we shall 
retain all the appetites and passions and needs peculiar 
to the mind, together with our memories, our knowledge, 
our loves and hates, and our mental and moral habiis. 
In a word, ive shall be in the other' life just what we 
were in this life, minus the influences and habits of 
the corporeal body. If it were possible to tell just how 
much of our thinking and feeling and doing were due to 
our body, we would be able to know what our thoughts 
and feelings and volitions would be apart from this 
fleshly tabernacle. We maybe sure that "when we go 
from this world, we shall be released from ten thou- 
sand things that belong to our physical state, and that 
tend to hinder our spiritual development," but we may be 
equally sure that we will retain our personality, and every 
trait and habit of a spiritual kind. 

In whatever way we may prefer to fill in the details 
of this picture of the life to come, I think we must con- 
clude that to regard it as a continuation of the present 



HEAVEN 225 

essential life of the soul is scriptural and reasonable. "As — 
after the same manner that — we have borne the image of 
the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." 
I. Now let us see what follows from this theory 
that the future life will be such a continuation of the pres- 
ent life. (1). This view makes it impossible for us 
to conceive of the future as divided into two places, 
answering to the words Heaven and Hell, and peopled, 
the one with good and happy spirits ; the other with evil 
and unhappy souls. There is no such arbitrary division 
here, and we may be sure there will not be and cannot be 
any such arbitrary separation there. To say nothing of 
the great difficulty, if not absolute impossibility, of draw- 
ing the line between the good and bad in any world, it is 
evidently God's method in developing the race to keep the 
good and bad together, that they may act and react upon 
each other. What he is doing here he is likely to do else- 
where. God, as he surveys the other life, sees the same 
commingling of spirits as he sees when he sweeps in this 
life. He sees the good working for and influencing the 
evil. He sees man lifting man higher and yet higher in 
the divine and blessed life. The saintly have something 
to do in the other life besides rejoice in their own salvation 
and sing anthems. It is an egregious error, then, to think 
that heaven and hell could be places. Do we not know 
that environment, — that is, surrounding conditions, influ- 
ences, and forces, — does not make our lives heavenly, 
using the word to mean either God-like or happy ; or 
hellish, using the word to mean either satanic or unhappy? 
Our happiness or unhappiness here does not so much 
depend on where we are as on what we are. A man may 
be in Southern California — one of God's earthly gardens — 
and yet be miserable ! A man may be in the bleakest part 

15 



226 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

of the earth, where flowers seldom bloom and birds rarely 
sing, and yet be contented and happy. 

Indeed, the mere transporting of a soul from one part 
of the universe to another or the confining of a spirit to 
one particular place would not suffice to keep it happy or 
unhappy, neither would it succeed in keeping it good or 
bad. Put an evil man in jail ; lock him up with other 
evil men, and only evil men, and would you be sure he 
would remain evil? Have we not seen criminals soften 
under the shame of imprisonment, and become reformed ? 
Their environment rather stimulated them to alter their 
ways, than confirmed them in them. There is in this 
human nature of ours a power that so persistently and so 
effectively works for righteousness, that if there were a 
local hell it would erelong become an incipient heaven. 
Take Tasmania, formerly called Van Diemen's Land. It 
was originally settled with convicts, but to-day many of 
the descendants of those transported criminals have become 
law-abiding and God-fearing citizens. That one's sur- 
roundings cannot bring perfect happiness was realized by 
many a person who attended the World's Fair. If the 
New Jerusalem portrayed by the Revelator ever came nigh 
unto this earth, it came in the White City on the shore of 
Lake Michigan. Some one has said : 

' ' There was the Holy City itself, appearing suddenly, as 
if let down from heaven by the very hand of God, containing 
no temple, because it was itself a vast temple, pervaded every- 
where with the presence of the Spirit, knowing no alternation 
of the darkness of the night with the brightness of day, 
because the night was as fair as the day. And there were 
the nations walking in the light of it, and the kings of the 
earth bringing their glory and honor into it ; and the pure 
stream flowing forth from the throne in the midst of it, to fill 



HEAVEN 227 

all the channels by the side of which stood, here the majestic 
trophies of industrious man, and there the evergreen trees of 
inspiring, renewing, nourishing, and all-healing Heaven, while 
everywhere sounded the blending melodies of happy souls 
floating upon love-lit waters of the River of Life." 

Everywhere? Xo, not everywhere did you catch the 
joyful tone or delighted look of happy souls, for even 
in that City — so heaven-like according to the traditional 
heaven — there were unhappy souls. One evening, as the 
twilight deepened, and the electric lights sprang into brill- 
iant being, I saw a woman sitting in the Court of Honor, 
the most beautiful and inspiring place in all the grounds, 
but she was not enjoying the scenery. Her eye had a 
distant gaze and her face a sad look — she was thinking 
of home, perhaps, or of some experience that made her 
heart-sick. That woman's yearning gaze made me think 
that the traditional Paradise could be unsatisfying to many 
a soul. It convinced me that one's surroundings do not 
necessarily bring pleasure or pain. Therefore I say it is 
not where we are but what we are that makes us happy or 
sad. Hence, the idea of heaven as a place, must give way 
to the idea of heaven as an internal condition of the soul ; 
and the idea of hell as a place must likewise be abandoned 
for the idea of hell as an interior state of the soul. 

2. Not only does this theory, that the coining life is a 
continuation of the present life, abolish the dogma that 
heaven and hell are places over there ; it also makes us see 
that it is imjoossible that the next life is one of perfect 
bliss or unalloyed misery. It will be a life of mixed 
experiences just as this life is. It is very common to say 
that 



228 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

" Heaven is the land where troubles cease, 

Where toils and tears are o'er; 
The blissful clime of rest and peace, 

Where cares distract no more; 
And not the shadow of distress 

Dims its unsullied blessedness." 

This doctrine is very common and very delightful, but 
can it be true ? Can an existence where human spirits are 
in all grades of development be absolutely and unqual- 
ifiedly blissful? Can a life where there may be willful 
disobedience of the highest, and where there is the possi- 
bility of remorse for a sinful past, be aught than a world 
of mingled joy and sadness ? If we are the beings there 
that we are here ; if our characters are the same after death 
as before ; if our sympathy grows tenderer and deeper as we 
advance in the spiritual realm, I do not see how we can 
help suffering at times over there as we do here. 

I remember that Channing has said : "I do and must 
regard heaven as a world of sympathy. Nothing, I believe,, 
has greater power to attract the regards of its benevolent 
inhabitants than the misery into which any of their fellow- 
creatures may have fallen. The suffering which belongs to a 
virtuous sympathy I cannot, then, separate from heaven." 

It stands to reason that in a life the counterpart of 
this, where the endeavor after personal righteousness must 
require struggle, and where labor in behalf of the right- 
eousness of others must demand self-sacrifice, the state of 
its inhabitants will be that of mingled joy and sorrow, and 
this must last until all souls have reached the perfection of 
God. Does some one say that it is a discouraging portrait- 
ure of the future to depict it as being an era of mixed 
experiences ? It may repel those who have erroneously 
been led to think of it as an existence of unalloyed bliss 
or unmitigated misery, but to a thoughtful mind this idea 



HEAVEN 229 

is quite agreeable, and even attractive. Can you not see, 
in the light of the implication that our present internal 
state of soul will have a vast deal to do with the measure 
of our future pleasure and pain, why it was that Jesus 
urged men to lay hold of what he called " eternal life " at 
once and firmly? Jesus knew that the only possession 
which insured man a surplus of happiness and peace in 
this world and the next was the possession of ' ' eternal 
life." Let a man know God; let him be in loving sym- 
pathy with his Heavenly Father ; let him be daily growing 
in God-likeness, and it shall not matter to him whether he 
is here or there ; he will have joy and hope in God ; he 
will find that his own struggles to be good and his sympa- 
thy for those who are battling or ought to be battling as he 
is toward the heights, while they may bring him sorrow, 
they will never cause him misery. A spirit of peace will be 
his, even the peace of Christ. "Eternal life" — that is, a 
knowledge and love of God — is the necessary and suffi- 
cient preparation for a satisfactory existence in any world. 
3 . We must also notice that the theory that the future 
life is to be a continuation of this makes it impossible for 
that existence to be a scene of indolence. If we are 
under the same necessity there as we are here of working 
out our own destiny, we shall never be able to fold our hands 
and say the task is finished. If we sigh for rest, as the 
tired soul often does, we must learn that our rest can 
never be that of indolent inaction ; it must be the rest of 
repose — resting in duty rather than resting from duty. 

Phillips Brooks has cautioned us to bear in mind that 
" heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not any 
mere luxurious dreaming over the spiritual repose that has 
been safely and forever won, but active, tireless, earnest work ; 



230 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

fresh, live enthusiasm for the high labors which eternity will 
offer." 

If we reflect at all, we see that we are under the neces- 
sity of going on. We are not yet what we shall be. We 
are in process of evolution. We are caught in the current 
of development and cannot get out of it. The future, 
therefore, will be a scene of service' and progress. All 
souls will continue to mount the ladder of perfection, 
round by round. It will be an ascent in spirituality and 
love. And this, really, is what virtuous and virtue- 
aspiring souls want. Virtue 

". . . desires no isles of the blest, 
No quiet seats of the just; 
To rest in a golden grove, 
Or bask in a summer sky; 
Give her the wages of going on, 
And not to die," 

and she is happy and strong. 

II. Now that we have seen what is impossible in the 
future life viewing it as a continuation of this, let us look 
at a few things that are made highly probable by this 
theory. 

In the first place, it is evident that the souls there are 
interested in the souls here. If memory survives and 
love not only continues but deepens, how can the departed 
forget us? Instead of growing away from us, they will 
grow toward us, for their growth is love-ward. Where 
their treasures are, there will their hearts be also. 

In the next life we do not lose our identity, and for 
this reason, I believe, in the second place, that the 
spirits of the departed are always near the souls in this 
world. The cry of the human heart is for its beloved. 
Lowell said, after the burial : 



HEAVEN 231 

" Immortal ? I feel it, I know it; 
Who doubts it of such as she ? 
But that is the pang's very secret — 
Immortal away from me ! 

Communion in spirit ? Forgive me; 
But I, who am earthly and weak, 
Would give all my income for dreamland, 
For a touch of her hand on my cheek." 

Of course, it is unreasonable to expect to hear the 
voice or to feel the physical touch of our beloved, but it 
is entirely rational to believe they are just as near to us as 
spirit can come to spirit. Think of the possible activity 
of the soul. Like thought, it can travel anywhere, and 
with the swiftness of light. From one planet to another, 
up and down the boundless universe, the liberated souls 
may go, and yet return to us instantly and be with us 
almost constantly. It is sometimes asked : Where are 
the dead ? Where in space may they be found ? Of course 
no one knows, but is it not inevitable for us to think of 
them as being here : in this earth, amid scenes familiar 
and with loved ones dear ? What spot in all the universe 
could attract you or me so strongly as the spot whereon 
our friends and loved ones dwelt? What scene could 
have a greater attraction for the reformer than this earth 
which had been the arena of his contests for humanity? 
What world can be a greater object of solicitude to the 
saints above than this sphere in which all souls are taking 
their first and serious lessons in destiny ? I think it is true 
that we are ever surrounded with a great cloud of wit- 
nesses. I think 

"It true that angels hear us, 

When we sing our songs of praise; 
That bright wings are waving near us, 
When to heaven our thoughts we raise. 
It is true that when we're praying 

Radiant forms are bending near; 
That they know what we are saying, 

And our every word can hear." 



232 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

Ever since I learned that Jesus said, "Lo, I am with 
you always," I have felt certain that the future life and the 
present life were close together and that those who passed 
from our physical sight and touch came back to be ever in 
spiritual contact with us. There is a beautiful and inter- 
pretative poem which makes this very clear : 

" Beside the dead I knelt for prayer, 
And felt a presence as I prayed; 
Lo! it was Jesus standing there, 
He smiled: ' Be not afraid! ' 

" ' Lord, thou hast conquered death, we know: 
Restore again to life,' I said, 
' This one who died an hour ago.' 
He smiled: ' She is not dead! ' 

" ' Asleep then, as thyself didst say, 
Yet thou canst lift the lids that keep 
Her prisoned eyes from ours away! 
He smiled: ' She doth not sleep! ' 

" ' Nay, then, tho' haply she do wake, 
And look upon some fairer dawn, 
Restore her to our souls that ache! ' 
He smiled: ' She is not gone! ' 

" ' Alas! too well we know our loss, 
Nor hope again our joy to touch 
Until the stream of death we cross! ' 
He smiled: ' There is no such! ' 

" ' Yet our beloved seem so far, 

The while we yearn to feel them near, 
Albeit with thee we trust they are.' 
He smiled: ' And I am here! ' 

" ' Dear Lord, how shall we know that they 
Still walk unseen with us and thee, 
Nor sleep, nor wander far away? ' 
He smiled: 'Abide in me.' " 

Abiding in Jesus. What does it mean ? It means to have 
the same comprehensive view of existence and the same 
spiritual sensitiveness that he had. Gain these and God 
becomes a God of the living in our sight ; and all souls 
are seen not only living unto him, but unto us ! 



HEAVEN 233 

How splendidly this line of thinking helps us to answer 
those familiar and earnest questions : Will we meet each 
other there? And shall ice know each other ivhen we 
meet? We shall meet our loved ones, for 

" Will not their hearts demand us there, — 
Those hearts, whose fondest throbs were given 
To us on earth, whose every prayer 
Petitioned for our ties in Heaven, 
Whose love outlived the stormy past, 
And closer twined around us here, 
And deeper grew until the last, — 
Such hearts will surely meet us there." 

Knowing as they do our present lives, following us every- 
where, and waiting for our coming, we cannot doubt that 
they will meet and welcome us. Do you recall that exqui- 
site picture which Dickens drew of the attitude of those in 
the other life toward those in this earth, in his " Child's 
Dream of a Star " ? 

A little boy and his sister select a star which seems to 
shine more brightly than all the rest right over the spire of the 
old church in the grave-yard. Every night they vie with each 
other to see who can first say, " I see the star." As they lie 
down to sleep they say, " God bless the star." Presently there 
is a new-made grave in the church-yard, and the little brother 
is left alone. Night after night he singles out the star that he 
and his departed sister used to Avatch. One night he dreams 
that the light from the star is a sparkling road, and he sees 
angels traveling up and down it, the star opening to let them 
in and out of heaven. As the star opens, he sees angels with 
beaming eyes waiting for those constantly coming up the shining 
stair-way. As the waiters, one by one, welcome their loved 
ones, they turn and disappear into the brilliant depths of 
heaven with them. But there are many angels who do not go 
away. Those they wait for have not yet come. The brother 
descries his sister among those still waiting at the entrance of 
the star, and he hears her ask of the leading angel that has 



234 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

just brought other souls thither : "Is my brother come?" and 
as the leader says " No," she is turning hopefully away when 
the dreaming brother stretches out his arms and cries, " Oh 
sister, I am here ! Take me." And she turns her beaming 
eyes upon him — and it is night, and the star is shining into the 
room, making long rays down towards him as he saw it 
through his tears. From that hour forth the boy looked 
upon that star as the home he was to go to. As the touching 
story continues, Dickens represents the sister as coming to the 
portal of the star when every fresh convoy of souls arrives, 
and asking the same eager question : "Is my brother come ? " 
always to receive the same negative reply, although one after 
the other she welcomes an infant daughter of her brother's, 
their own mother, and then his maiden daughter. The years 
pass by ; the brother has grown old and weak. One night as 
he lies upon his bed, his children standing round, he cries, as 
he cried so long ago : " I see the star ! " They whisper one 
another, "He is dying." And he says, "I am. My age is 
falling from me like a garment, and I move towards the star 
as a child. And O, my Father, now I thank Thee that it has 
so often opened to receive those dear ones who await me ! " 

Yery beautifully and very truly, it seems to me, this 
allegory represents the attitude of those who have gone 
before toward those remaining behind. They are watching 
for us and waiting for us, and they will meet and welcome 
us at the last. Shall we know them? If Swedenborg's 
idea is true, we shall know such of them as we have been 
associated with for any length of time. We shall recognize 
them as we recognize our friends and loved ones in this 
world after a separation, — by their appearance and manner. 
If Swedenborg's idea be not true, or if we have had but 
a brief acquaintance with them, the recognition will come 
from their side. They will know us and make themselves 
known to us. As the growing sister kept watch over her 



HEAVEN 235 

darling brother, — as she welcomed him with gestures of 
love and joy to the eternal abode, so we may be sure that 
our departed are ever watching over us and will greet us 
in the sweet by and by in ways that will reveal who they 
are and fill us with delight. 

4. There is one other important question to be answered 
before I close this discussion of the future life, namely : 
Will there be any missing faces there? The reply has 
already leaped into your minds. You are saying : If the 
next life be a continuation of this, there will be no missing 
faces there. Our theory makes it certain that every child 
ever born into this world has been re-born into that. If 
one soul survives the grave, all souls survive. They are 
all there : all of God's offspring. Yes, the good and the 
bad are there together, mingled as they were here ; and 
the same processes of development are there going on 
which are here lifting the race higher and yet higher in 
goodness. The bad are becoming good ; the good are 
becoming better ; and all are growing toward the best. 
God, the loving Father, as he looks on the two worlds, 
sees all the children that ever sprang forth from him ; sees 
them coming slowly up to the standard he erected before 
they were born ; sees the time when they shall be what he 
intended ; and hears afar the song of praise that shall roll 
in upon his heart when the Race has reached Maturity ! 

This portraiture of the future life may be new to some. 
It may suggest questions I have not had time to answer. 
But it is a picture which has its warrants in the Bible and 
in Good Sense, and does it not satisfy and stimulate? 

It was Starr King who said: "To my mind one of the 
sublimest records of history is the reply of the old heathen 
Socrates to his judges, when they condemned him, at seventy 
years old, to die. 'If death,' said he, 'be a removal from 



236 GOOD SENSE IN RELIGION 

hence to another place, and if all the dead are there, what 
greater blessing can there be than this, my judges? At what 
price would you not estimate a conference with Orpheus and 
Musa3us, with Hesiod and Homer? I go to meet them, and to 
converse with them, and to acquaint myself with all the great 
sages that have been the glory of the past, and that have died 
by the unjust sentence of time.' That is what we need, — 
to think of the future, not as the dungeon where the wicked 
are locked up forever in an arbitrary doom, and the good shut 
apart from the evil to enjoy forever the consciousness of being 
saved from perdition, but with vigorous imagination to regard it 
as a great sphere of life, filled with society amid whose myriads 
we must rank according to quality, overarched with all the 
glory of God's wisdom, and flooded with the effluence of his 
holiness and love, with continual occupations for the exploring 
mind of Newton, for the massive understanding of Bacon, for 
the genius of Shakespeare, for the reverent intellect of Channing, 
for the saintly heart of Fenelon, — with duties for every faculty 
and every affection, and with joys proportioned exactly to our 
desire of truth, our willingness of service, and the purity of 
love that makes us kindred with Christ and G-od." 

It is glorious to look forward to thus going on, in 
company with our friends and those we dearly love and 
the great leaders of all ages, working out the marvelous 
destiny the wise and loving Father has appointed us. 
Expectations like these enable us to join in the peaceful, 
trustful, radiant prayer of the gentle Whittier, who said : 

"When on my day of life the night is falling, 

And in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, 
I hear far voices out of darkness calling 
My feet to paths unknown, 

" Thou, who hast made my home of life so pleasant, 
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay ; 
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present, 
Be Thou my strength and stay. 



HEAVEN 237 

" I have but thee, O Father ! let Thy spirit 
Be with me, then, to comfort and uphold; 
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, 
Nor street of shining gold. 

" Suffice it if, my good and ill unreckoned, 

And both forgiven thro' thy abounding grace, 
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned 
Unto my fitting place. 

" There, from the music round about me stealing, 
I fain would learn the new and holy song, 
And find at last beneath thy trees of healing, 
The life for which I long." 



SCRIPTURES THAT SUPPORT THE DOCTRINES 
ADVOCATED IN THIS VOLUME.* 

1. Conscience sacred; inquiry to be full and free. Luke 
xii., 54-57; Rom. xiv., 1-5; 1 Cor. x., 15; 1 Thess. v., 21. 

2. The Bible the most important and sacred of books, but 
not to be accepted as infallible, because in some of its parts 
opposed to the teachings of science, the best conscience and 
reason of our time, and the teachings of Jesus. Matt, v., 
33-44. Compare Matt, v., 44 with Ps. cix. ; with Deut. 
xix., 13-21; with Josh, xi., 6-23; and with 1 Sam. xv., 
2-11. Josh, x., 12-13 ; Jonah i., 17, and ii., 10. 

3. One God, and only one, the Father, a Spirit, the only 
proper object of worship ; in contradistinction from a trinity, 
and worship of Jesus or of the Virgin Mary. Matt. vi.. 9 ; 
Mark xii., 29; Jno. iv.,24; xvii., 3; xx., 17; Eph. iy.,-6; 
1 Tim. ii., 5. 

4. Human nature not inherently evil (or, as the creeds of 
at least two of our great Christian denominations say, "dead 
in sin, wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and 
body, and therefore bound over to the wrath of God"), but, 
formed "in the image of God," and even in its lowest estate 
containing much that is beautiful, noble, and well pleasing to 
God. Gen. 1., 26, 27 ; Rom. ii., 14, 15 ; Mark x., 14, 15 ; 
Luke vii., 1-9, 36-48 ; Ps. cxxxix., 14-16. 

* Quoted almost verbatim from Rev. J. T. Sunderland's tract on 
"What Unitarians Believe," thus showing the practical oneness, theo- 
logically, between Universalists and Unitarians. It is true that Univer- 
salists and Unitarians have some very conservative and some very radical 
preachers and laymen, but the rank and file of each denomination 
occupy ground between these two extremes. The tendency of both 
sects is progressive. 



TEXTS SUPPORTING DOCTRINES ADVANCED 239 

5. Jesus not God the Son, but the son of God (his sonship 
consisting in moral god-likeness, many others besides him 
being called in Scripture " sons of God") ; not Deity but divine 
(all humanity being the "offspring of God," and therefore, in 
the degree of its perfection, divine) . Matt, xvi., 16 ; Acts ix., 
20 ; xvii., 29 ; 1 Jno. iii., 1,2; Hosea i., 10 ; Matt, v., 9 ; 
Gen. i., 27 ; James iii., 9. 

6. God's love universal and everlasting, extending as much 
to the next world as to this ; all punishment remedial and 
disciplinary ; all men finally to be saved. Is. xlix., 15 ; Jer. 
xxxi., 3; Ps. cxxxvi., 1; Matt, xviii., 14; Col. i., 20; 
Heb. xii., 5-10 ; 1 Cor. xv., 22-28 ; Luke xv., 20-24. 

7. The soul immortal; its highest possession, "eternal 
life;" its ultimate condition, " perfection." Jno. xiv., 1—4; 
Luke xx., 37, 38; 1 Cor. xv., 1-58; Eph. iv., 13; Matt. 
v., 48; Mark, x., 30; Rom. vi., 22, 23; Jno. xvii., 3; 
Jno. x., 28. 



A FEW VERY CHOICE BOOKS RECOMMENDED 
FOR FURTHER READING. 



1. Reason in Religion and the Bible: 

Seat of Authority in Religion, Martineau; Gospel Criti- 
cism, Com-: The Gospel and its Earliest Interpretations, 
Cone: Tht Bible, Sunderland; The Bible of To-day, 
Chadwick ; Back to >h> Old Testament for the Message 
of the New, Curtis; Revelation,* Atwood. 

2. God: 

Belie/ in God, Schurman; The Idea of God. Fiske; 
The Pwrposi of God, Dodge : The Fatherhood of God,* 
Adams. 

3. Evolution and Man : 

Thr Origin of Man, Darwin; The Descent of Man, 
Darwin; Our Heredity from God, Powell; Darn-in 
and After Darwin, Romanes; Weismannism, Romanes; 
Cosmic Philosophy, Fiske; Destiny of Man, Fiske; 
Evolution and it* Relation to Religious Thought, Le 
Conte. 

4. Jesus Christ and Salvation : 

Christ in the Life,* Wbodbridge; Atonement,* Tucker; 
Salvation,* Cone; Seat of Authority in Religion, Mar- 
tineau. 

5. Hell and Annihilation: 

Universalism Asserted, Allin. 

6. Immortality and Heaven : 

Witness to Immortality, Gordon. 

* Manuals of Faith and Duty. 



